The acting legend who praised and insulted Robert De Niro in the same breath: “I had irritated him”
We’ve all said things we immediately wished we could unsay, whether it’s a compliment that goes terribly wrong or an opinion that you really should have kept to yourself.
However, few of us have directed these misfires at Robert De Niro, a man who is probably so used to being fawned over that any sort of conversational friction is a fireable offence.
You don’t have to be a spineless sycophant to praise De Niro, obviously. The actor is one of the all-time greats, having revolutionised his craft in the 1970s and standing out as one of the main influences for successive generations of actors. To praise Robert De Niro is to be blindingly obvious and maybe even a little boring. He is not chronically under-appreciated, like Gena Rowlands, or chronically over-hyped, like Timothée Chalamet. He is the GOAT, or one of them, at least, so you’d better tread carefully when approaching him with advice.
One person who didn’t tread carefully enough was an actor who falls squarely into overrated territory. Charlton Heston has been called “the greatest bad actor of all time”, which is to say that he was cast in a lot of insane movies and held the line as a stoic, square-jawed archetype without seeming to recognise the ridiculousness of his surroundings.
During a 2007 interview with Esquire, the Ben-Hur star recounted a painful interaction he had with De Niro that still haunted him. He had spotted the younger actor at a restaurant a year or two previously and had dutifully approached him to pay his actorly respects.
“Mr De Niro, we’ve not met, but I can’t miss the opportunity to tell you that I think you’re the best American film actor of your generation,” he began. It was a good start, and De Niro acknowledged it with a thank you. Then Heston told him that he should be doing Shakespeare, explaining, “If you don’t do those parts, you’re not in the game.”
This is a dick move coming from a Hollywood icon who boasted about having done more Shakespeare roles on screen than any other American actor. He was essentially telling the star of Raging Bull that he, Heston, was the most “in the game” of any actor in the country, including De Niro. Chances are, the younger actor had seen a Heston project or two and therefore knew that reciting the Bard did not ensure a good performance.
To his credit, Heston read the room pretty quickly. “I realized that I had irritated him,” he said, “And I had no right to do that.” He apologised for disturbing the actor and scuttled back from whence he came.
De Niro almost certainly shrugged off the interaction as soon as Heston exited his peripheral vision, but let’s not make assumptions too hastily. Can it really be a coincidence that, within a year or two, the Taxi Driver star was playing a character named Captain Shakespeare in the fantasy movie Stardust? Perhaps it wasn’t just a punchline at Heston’s expense, but still, he was “doing Shakespeare.”
The fact that it involved a pink tutu rather than a Richard III soliloquy was the icing on the cake.
