Acting for America: Movie Stars of the 1980s

Robert De Niro: Star as Actor Auteur

19 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 1 Robert De Niro Star as Actor Auteur AARON BAKER By the time he received the Best Actor Academy Award for his performance in Raging Bull (1980), Robert De Niro’s critical reputation was firmly in place. He had already been nominated twice, in 1976 for Taxi Driver and in 1978 for The Deer Hunter, and had won as Best Supporting Actor for The Godfather: Part II in 1974. De Niro’s second Academy Award for playing prizefighter Jake LaMotta also solidified his association with Martin Scorsese, who had directed three of his films: Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver, and New York, New York (1977). While both men enjoyed substantial critical success as a result of their collaboration, during the 1980s Scorsese’s influence on De Niro would also manifest itself in the actor’s ability to establish an auteurist formal and thematic pattern in his film performances . De Niro’s creative vision appears in his choice of roles, his research into a character’s background, his willingness to change his physical appearance to portray a character, the improvisatory contributions he often made to dialogue, and the thematic continuity of consistently playing characters who commented on the social construction of masculinity. Paul McDonald has explained that while the film industry needs to sell very expensive movie products to audiences “who have very little idea what they will get,” “stars names are one of the mechanism’s used . . . to predetermine audience expectations” (“Stars” 155). By 1980 the name Robert De Niro conveyed a star image with clearly defined traits: anger, alienation, and violence—what one critic called his “often fearsome screen presence . . . full of choked rage” (Schruers 43). De Niro’s most celebrated parts from the 1970s had established those characteristics, and some of his twelve movie roles in the 1980s continued to reinforce them. Yet the anger and violence of De Niro’s highest profile roles from the 1980s, particularly in Raging Bull, The King of Comedy (1982), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), The Mission (1986), and The Untouchables (1987), increasingly gave his star image a dimension of social critique directed at what Robin Wood has called Hollywood’s version of “the Ideal Male: the virile adventurer, potent . . . man of action” (Hitchcock 291). Writing in 1985, Robert Ray named this male character who is central to so many Hollywood movies the “outlaw hero,” who disregards the laws of the larger society in favor of his own “private notions of right and wrong” (59). Several of De Niro’s 1980s roles built on the delusional vigilantism of his Travis Bickle character in Taxi Driver to show the potential danger of such self-righteous violence. As a counterweight to these antisocial characters, De Niro also sought to diversify his roles somewhat, playing more patient, cooperative men in True Confessions (1981), Falling in Love (1984), and Jacknife (1989) as an alternative to the destructiveness of the outlaw hero’s narcissistic and violent selfassertion . Besides his acting and collaboration with Scorsese, by the 1980s De Niro had also become known for a stubborn refusal to share information about his personal life; Jay Carr in 1988 called him “Hollywood’s most unreachable actor” (Chicago Tribune, 24 July 1988, 13:6). Such insistence on privacy compromised De Niro’s ability to fit the model of Hollywood stars that Richard Dyer has defined as a pairing of movie roles and contextualizing media discourse (Heavenly Bodies 2–3). De Niro’s resistance to self-revelation, combined with his tendency to play parts critical of the individualized masculinity typical for A-list actors, limited his stardom by denying audiences the voyeuristic access to a behind-the-scenes view of the glamorous personal life expected from stars, as well as by keeping him from roles that 20 AARON BAKER transferred such a charismatic, empowered identity into heroic lead characters . In 1987, De Niro hired Creative Artists Agency (CAA), run by the hottest agent in Hollywood, Michael Ovitz, to represent him. His plan was to modify his image as a serious actor who always played “dark” dramatic roles with an action comedy, Midnight Run, a CAA package set up by screenwriter George Gallo and director Martin Brest (Baxter 268–69). De Niro went so far as to grant a rare interview to Rolling Stone in 1988 to promote Midnight Run, yet even as he worked to enhance the film’s...