The actor Al Pacino called the second coming of James Dean: “He blew the roof off”
As a young actor navigating New York’s theatre scene in the 1960s, Al Pacino encountered all kinds of aspiring thespians, each striving to hone their craft.
His real development as a performer, though, came during his four years at the Herbert Berghof Studio in Greenwich Village. While studying there, Pacino met a fellow student whose talent blew him away. The two became close friends and even lived together for a time. Pacino was convinced that if anyone from the studio was destined to make it in Hollywood, it was this friend—because he truly believed he was the second coming of counterculture icon James Dean.
When Pacino enrolled at the studio under acting teacher Charlie Laughton, he was a penniless young man who couldn’t even afford to pay the tuition fee. He and Laughton simply got along and had similar interests, and when Pacino showed him how dedicated he was by cleaning the hallways and classrooms, Laughton granted him a scholarship. Pacino then learned his craft by becoming deeply obsessed with the works of Shakespeare.
“If the hour was late and you heard someone in your alleyway with a bombastic voice shouting iambic pentameter into the night, that was probably me, training myself on the famous Shakespeare soliloquies,” Pacino joked in his memoir Sonny Boy. “I would bellow out monologues as I rambled through the streets of Manhattan. I’d do it by the factories, at the edges of town, places where no one was around.”
One day, though, when Pacino was in Laughton’s class, another young actor performed a monologue that wasn’t anything he recognised from Shakespeare. Instead, it was from the Eugene O’Neill play The Iceman Cometh – and Pacino was utterly stunned by it. The stirring rendition of O’Neill’s words “blew the roof off” the class, and Pacino soon struck up a friendship with the actor he declared “the next James Dean, as far as I was concerned”.
Comparing an actor to Dean was no small thing in those days, especially for Pacino, who grew up worshipping the East of Eden star. As a young man with a rebellious nature and a distrust of authority, Pacino related to Dean’s characters, especially Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause. He once said that the film “had a very powerful effect” on him, and he gushed, “Dean was an inspiration. He made that connection with an audience. He reached everybody.”
When Pacino talked to the actor whose presence so reminded him of his idol, he introduced himself as Martin Sheen. Yes, that Martin Sheen, star of Apocalypse Now, Badlands, and The West Wing. If nothing else, Pacino could certainly recognise talent when he laid eyes on it.
After a while of getting to know each other, Sheen let Pacino in on a secret. “You know what my real name is, don’t you?” he asked. It turned out his given name was Ramón Estévez, and he was half-Spanish. He came from Ohio, where he was one of ten children in a working-class family that always had money problems. The two men realised their backgrounds and ambitions were so similar that the only option was to become close friends for life.
As Pacino put it, “He had tenacity and grit, and I could tell he was one of the best people I’d ever know.”
