Alfredo James "Al" Pacino (born April 25, 1940) is an American film and stage actor and director. He is famous for playing mobsters, including Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy and Tony Montana in Scarface, though he has also appeared several times on the other side of the law — as a police officer, a detective and a lawyer. His role as Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman won him the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1993 after receiving seven previous Oscar nominations, one of them being in the same year.
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Source: Wikipedia

Alfredo James "Al" Pacino (born April 25, 1940) is an American film and stage actor and director. He is famous for playing mobsters, including Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy and Tony Montana in Scarface, though he has also appeared several times on the other side of the law — as a police officer, a detective and a lawyer. His role as Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman won him the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1993 after receiving seven previous Oscar nominations, one of them being in the same year.
He made his feature film debut in the 1969 film Me, Natalie in a minor supporting role, before playing the leading role in the 1971 drama The Panic in Needle Park. Pacino made his major breakthrough when he was given the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather in 1972, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Other Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor were for Dick Tracy and Glengarry Glen Ross. Oscar nominations for Best Actor include The Godfather Part II, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, ...And Justice for All and Scent of a Woman.
In addition to a career in film, he has also enjoyed a successful career on stage, winning Tony Awards for Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? and The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. A longtime fan of Shakespeare, he made his directorial debut with Looking for Richard, a quasi-documentary on the play Richard III. Pacino has received numerous lifetime achievement awards, including one from the American Film Institute. He is a method actor, taught mainly by Lee Strasberg and Charles Laughton at the Actors Studio in New York.
Although he has never married, Pacino has had several relationships with actresses and has three children.

Early life and education
Pacino was born in East Harlem, New York City to Italian American parents Rose and Salvatore Pacino, who divorced when he was two years old. When he was two, his mother moved to the South Bronx near the Bronx Zoo, to live with her parents, Kate and James Gerardi, who originated from Corleone, Sicily. His father moved to Covina, California, and worked as an insurance salesman and restaurateur. Pacino attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in New York. During his teenage years 'Sonny', as he was known to his friends, aimed to become a baseball player, though he was also nicknamed 'The Actor'. Pacino flunked nearly all of his classes except English and dropped out of school at 17. His mother disagreed with his decision; they had an argument and he left home. He worked at a string of low-paying jobs, including messenger boy, busboy, janitor, and postal clerk, in order to finance his acting studies.
He started smoking at age nine, drinking and casual marijuana use at age thirteen, but never took hard drugs. His two closest friends died young of drug abuse at the ages of 19 and 30. Growing up in the Bronx, he got into occasional fights and was something of a troublemaker at school.
He acted in basement plays in New York's theatrical underground but was rejected for the Actors Studio while still a teenager. Pacino then joined the Herbert Berghof Studio (HB Studio), where he met acting teacher Charlie Laughton, who became his mentor and best friend. During this period, he was frequently unemployed and homeless, and sometimes had to sleep on the street, in theaters, or at friends' houses. In 1962, his mother died at the age of 43. The following year, his grandfather, James Gerardi, one of the most influential people in his life, also died.
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