The greatest movie star in Hollywood history, according to Al Pacino: “It’s innate or something”
Actors and movie stars are often two separate and distinct breeds, but when Al Pacino first broke through in the 1970s, those lines became more blurred than ever before.
Today, the distinction feels easier to make. Ryan Reynolds is a movie star, but Daniel Day-Lewis is an actor. Joaquin Phoenix is an actor, but Tom Cruise is a movie star, although you do have the A-listers who have one foot in each world, with Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, and Leonardo DiCaprio at the top of the list.
In the ‘Golden Age’, everybody knew who the stars were, but ‘New Hollywood’ upended the status quo. For arguably the first time ever, the biggest names in the industry were also its best actors, and many of them didn’t look like the conventional ideal of a matinee idol, either.
Alongside Pacino, there was Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, and Dustin Hoffman, to name a few, not that the movie star was dying out, as Burt Reynolds would attest at his peak. Actors deliver the performances, whereas stars put the arses in the seats, but that generation could do both.
There’s no recipe for securing cinematic superstardom, and Pacino himself has always seemed bemused that he became one of the faces of ‘New Hollywood’, not that he should have been, when five Academy Award nominations in seven years and a string of seminal films couldn’t have made it any clearer.
As for what it takes, though, he’s not so sure, although he’s got a handle on who he thought did it best. “That’s a hard one to figure,” he pondered, musing on what it takes to be a movie star. “It’s innate or something. I think it comes with the territory. Let’s put it this way; I just don’t know how Cary Grant did it.”
Movie stars don’t come more iconic than Grant, who was never considered one of his era’s most talented thespians from a purely performative standpoint, but for decades, there weren’t many who shared his orbit as one of the most recognisable, famous, and in-demand faces in all of Tinseltown.
“When I look at him, I think, ‘Wow,'” Pacino continued. “He had a few attributes, like looks and stuff like that, but at the same time, he also had this delivery, this charisma, the person he became, this persona. Now, that belonged to a certain age, a certain era. Movie stars are different today.”
With that in mind, turning to the modern era, he named DiCaprio “as another kind of movie star” and George Clooney as being “closer to the ones that I’m familiar with,” something the actor and filmmaker has become used to hearing, having been constantly compared to a ‘Golden Age’ throwback. Still, none of them hold a candle to Cary.
