Brooding and intense, Al Pacino has remained one of Hollywood’s premier actors throughout his lengthy career, a popular and critic’s favourite whose list of credits includes many of the finest films of his era.

But getting there wasn’t easy for Al Pacino. Alfredo James Pacino was born to a family of Italian immigrants in East Harlem, New York, on April 25, 1940. His father, Salvatore, was an insurance agent who split from his mother Rose when Pacino was just two — mother and child moved in with her parents in a dirt-poor area near the Bronx zoo. When he was older, his mother would take him to the cinema and he’d act out the plotlines to his grandma on his return.

His teachers spotted his talent, cast him in school plays and asked him to read from the Bible at assembly. He enjoyed this but did not consider acting as a profession till, at age 14, he saw Chekov’s The Seagull performed. This led to him enrolling at the prestigious High School of the Performing Arts but flunking everything but English. Eventually at 17 he dropped out.

Yet Pacino was remorseless in his ambition. He worked to finance his further studies, toiling as a messenger-boy, a movie-usher, an apartment superintendent and as a mail-deliverer at Commentary magazine.

He attended acting classes and gained experience in basement plays before joining the Herbert Berghof Studio, under the tutelage of the legendary Charles Laughton. In January 1961 he was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon — he threw himself into the theatrical underground. Off-Broadway, he wrote, directed and acted, kept moving, and finally and crucially, in 1966, he came to the Actor’s Studio to study the Method.

Pacino’s stage career was a tough grind. In 1962, he’d done Jack And The Beanstalk at the Children’s Theatre, then honed his craft in many productions. He spent a season at the Charles Playhouse in Boston, returned to New York for The Indian Wants the Bronx, a role that won him an Obie award in 1968.

At last, he was on Broadway. The year 1969 was the breakthrough year, as a psychotic junkie in Does The Tiger Wear A Necktie? With his very Italian combination of menacing contemplation and terrifyingly focused rage, he was chosen above Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson to play Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Pacino found himself rightly Oscar-nominated for his efforts, aside from 1973’s The Scarecrow, he was nominated for his next three roles in Serpico, Godfather Part 2 and 1975’s Dog Day Afternoon.

Following this incredible spate of success, Pacino returned to his first love — the stage. He played Mark Anthony, Hamlet and Othello, before taking on the part of Walter Cole in David Mamet’s American Buffalo, which he performed on and off between 1980 and 1984.

When he did venture back into the movies, he usually chose only the most intense and controversial parts. But his 1985’s Revolution came as his failure. Badly stung, he did not return to the Silver Screen for four years, concentrating instead on his stage-works.

When Pacino went back to the movies, it was with a bang. First, there was 1989s Sea Of Love, and then he was a hilariously evil Big Boy Caprice in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy. Next came Frankie And Johnny. Finally came the Oscar, for his performance as the romantic, predatory, abrasive and blind Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade in Scent Of A Woman, a remake of a 1975 Italian movie.

In the meantime, he had taken up directing. From 1996 to 1999, he was once more to be found treading the boards, performing several runs of Eugene O’Neil’s Hughie. Chinese Coffee saw him once more in the director’s chair.

He was once quoted as saying “The actor becomes an emotional athlete. The process is painful — my personal life suffers,” and this does seem to have been the way for much of his life.