The actor Robert De Niro always loved: “Since I was a kid, I always watched his movies”
For a long time, Robert De Niro has been an actor aspiring thespians have looked up to with amazement and wonder, hoping they can go on to achieve even a fraction of what he accomplished in the industry.
One of the greatest performers in cinema history, De Niro has lent his name to a litany of all-time classics and given several of the medium’s finest-ever turns, notching a pair of Academy Award wins from nine nominations along the way.
No discussion of the best to ever do it is complete without him, but he’s been in the exact same position as the future generations who idolised his work. As tends to be the case with many of his generation, Marlon Brando was De Niro’s definitive influence, but he wasn’t the only one.
Not only did he get to share the screen with his idol—albeit under typically difficult late-stage Brando circumstances on Frank Oz’s troubled The Score—but he also headlined the remake of a film that was originally led by another of his personal favourites, bringing his hero worship full circle.
Writer and director Kirk Jones’ drama Everybody’s Fine saw De Niro as Frank Goode, a recent widower eagerly awaiting a reunion with his four grown children eight months after his wife’s death. When they all cancel, though, he defies the advice of his doctor and hits the road to reconnect with them individually.
An English-language reinterpretation of Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1990 tale of the same name, De Niro steps into the shoes previously inhabited by Marcello Mastroianni, a true legend of world cinema. The regular Federico Fellini collaborator was the first actor to earn an Oscar nod for a non-English performance, and he endures as one of international cinema’s titans.
For De Niro, it was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. “I love Mastroianni,” he admitted to Spliced Wire. “Since I was a kid I always watched his movies. He’s been in great films; part of the great Italian traditions, obviously. But it was a different thing, totally. Kirk made it his own. The structure was there and all that stuff, but it was totally different.”
Unfortunately for De Niro, those differences were reflected in the differing receptions. Whereas Mastroianni’s Everybody’s Fine was widely acclaimed, his underperformed at the box office by failing to recoup its budget from cinemas and was greeted with a shrug of indifference by critics and audiences alike.
At least he got to follow in Mastroianni’s footsteps, and it must have been a thrill for De Niro to inhabit a role previously played by one of his acting inspirations. It wasn’t even the last remake of Everybody’s Fine, either, with a Chinese version released in 2016, that once again failed to live up to the standards set by the original.
