The most challenging role of Robert De Niro’s career
As both one of the greatest actors of all time and a famed practitioner of the method technique, Robert De Niro‘s finest performances have been defined by how far he’s willing to push himself.
Whether it’s learning to play the saxophone for New York, New York, studying brain surgeons to play a heating engineer in Brazil, or gaining 30 pounds, shaving his head, and tracking down Al Capone’s tailor for what essentially amounted to an extended cameo in The Untouchables, he’s regularly gone all-in.
That’s without even mentioning meeting with his own stalker in preparation for The King of Comedy, working 12-hour shifts as a cabbie ahead of Taxi Driver, living in Sicily for months to channel a younger version of Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, or getting buff and having his teeth sharpened to terrorise as Max Cady in Cape Fear.
It’s a remarkable level of dedication, which has been reflected on-screen through a string of the very best performances ever committed to film. However, there’s one role that stands out for De Niro as the toughest of them all, which came when he reunited with Martin Scorsese for the seminal Raging Bull.
To bring Jake LaMotta to life, the leading man not only trained intensely to convince as a boxer, but his weight fluctuated throughout the movie as it covered the ups and downs of its subject’s life and career. As he explained to The Hollywood Reporter, that made it the toughest task in his filmography.
Beyond “the weight and all that”, De Niro recalled his own experiences of seeing LaMotta first-hand during his later years. “I remember I used to see Jake LaMotta: He’d work in a kind of strip place right on Seventh Avenue in the 40s,” he said. “He’d be standing right out there near the sidewalk, and he was overweight and this and that. I said, ‘Jesus, look what happened to him.'”
That juxtaposition between a pugilist in their prime and the man he eventually became hooked De Niro, which was one of the main reasons he was so attracted to the project. “I thought the graphic difference of being out of shape and then being a young fighter really was interesting,” he continued. “I thought I’d like to see if I could gain that weight.”
Of course, the end result was an Academy Award win for ‘Best Actor’ in one of the very best motion pictures either De Niro or long-time collaborator Scorsese had ever lent their names to, with his ferocious-yet-vulnerable take on LaMotta an unforgettable character study that endures today as one of the most staggering acting performances there’s ever been. In the end, the physical sacrifices were well worth it based on the end result.
