The actor Francis Ford Coppola called the “greatest of modern times”
After working with some of the finest actors to ever grace the silver screen – and directing more than one of them to an Academy Award-winning performance – Francis Ford Coppola knows greatness when he sees it. Unfortunately, one actor he deemed among the best had stepped away from the movie industry before he made his feature-length debut in 1973.
At the height of his fame and popularity, Paul Muni was held in such esteem that he was one of the few talents under the old studio system who had the power to choose which projects they appeared in. He may have only appeared in 23 films between his debut in 1929’s The Valiant and his swansong in The Last Angry Man 30 years later, but in that period, he still managed to accrue five Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Actor’, even though he never ended up winning.
Muni was also an accomplished stage performer with a Tony Award under his belt and was an early proponent of what would soon become an accepted and widely adopted technique for almost all of the biggest names of Coppola’s era. Immersing himself in his characters for months at a time, he was a method actor long before it became commonplace, one that could always be relied upon to deliver a powerhouse turn.
He was a skilled makeup artist, too, a talent that allowed him to disappear into any number of roles, which extended to playing a septet of wildly different parts in the lost film Seven Faces, with his career hardly limited to one archetype – or even nationality, for that matter.
In fact, it was that chameleonic nature that saw Coppola state that “Paul Muni is arguably the greatest actor of modern times”. Marlon Brando was another who held him in the highest regard as one of his biggest influences, something The Godfather director would also allude to.
Continuing to state his point, Coppola noted that “as Marlon Brando said, [Muni was] his own inspiration for what acting really was.” Pointing out his background in Yiddish theatre, the five-time Oscar winner praised him for “a series of remarkable film portrayals,” which extended to “the Italian gangster in Scarface, the French chemist Louis Pasteur, the Mexican Indian President Benito Juárez, and French novelist Emile Zola.”
Fittingly, Al Pacino – who had worked with Coppola on The Godfather and its sequel prior to headlining the remake of a Muni classic in Scarface – was another huge fan, as he shared with The New York Times: “Well, that character, Tony Montana, was written by Oliver Stone and directed by Brian De Palma, who wanted the heightened reality. Brian wanted to do an opera. All I wanted to do was imitate Paul Muni!”
