My favorite actor is Al Pacino.  Perhaps he has the capacity of a dog to command trust, response, and affection.  He can express his meaning just with his facial configuration, especially the eyes and lips.  (The mouths and eyes of dogs are so expressive.)  And he has an innate sense of timing.  The great champions of any craft make it look so natural – so easy.

He started off on the stage, and he would keep on the stage throughout, but he made his fame on the screen.  He has just published his memoire Sonny Boy.  It is a remarkable document that is plainly intended as his personal and artistic last will and testament.  It is not overtly ghost written and does not indulge in name dropping for the sake of it.  (And let’s face it, that’s what a lot of us will buy it for.)  It has about it an aura of candor that compels my intellectual assent.  It is, if you like, a cri de coeur of a singular artist standing on the brink of eternity.

He was born of Italian parents in the Bronx.  His parents separated when he was young and he lived with grandparents.  His mother was attractive, but fragile, and she later killed herself.  He kept contact with his father, but he comes back to his mum on the final page.

Life was a struggle for the kid and his mates, but he got through.  When his three best mates died as heroin addicts, he was up to his neck in Shakespeare and Chekhov.  And he had a sense of vocation for the stage that would match that of a nurse or a novice.  It has driven him throughout his whole life. 

But with that background, success and fame would pose the usual tests for the rising star with the bottle, skirt, drugs, the press, wheelers and dealers, worse egotists, and downright crooks.  He eventually got on top of the grog and drugs, but his marriage – or ‘relationship’- record is at best par.  That is hardly surprising – he played against many of the most beautiful women in the game, and he ended up on close terms with Elizabeth Taylor.  (And, yes, he and Diane Keaton did shack up together for a while.)

The breakthrough came, as if from nowhere, with The Godfather.  Coppola put this unknown against the great Marlon Brando, who sat on the right hand of God in that pantheon, and it is one of the greatest films ever made.  (Along with II and III.  I have the quite heretical view that III is the best of them.  It winds up where it should – in an opera house in Sicily, and the Vatican.  It thunders home with the crushing velocity of Anna Karenin, Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, and Turner’s Rain, Train, and Speed.)

There followed Serpico, and so many other films.  And life in the theatre.  I will not name the films – I never saw him on stage – but we were blessed to see him with his friend ‘Bob’ De Niro in Godfather II, Heat, and The Irishman.  There were some duds, but many classic films – such as Scarface. 

My favorite may well be Scent of a Woman – for which he won an Oscar (from, I think, nine nominations).  It has two scenes in which Hollywood justifies its existence.  In one, he dances the tango at an upmarket hotel on Seventh Avenue that looks very familiar to me.  In another he drives a Ferrari full tilt on an avenue in central Manhattan. The problem was that he was playing a blind army officer intent on suicide.  Those scenes alone justify a night out at the movies.

Like many actors, he says he does not read the critics.  They certainly got to him about Richard III, which led him to make a film about playing the part – and to play Shylock on stage and on film.

Al Pacino is as much an artist as any painter, pianist or poet.  He has given freely of his art to millions.  And at one hell of a price at times. 

This extraordinary memoire sounds to me as frank as that of another artist from that part of the world – Joseph Heller.  As if by instinct, he goes back to his childhood and mum to close the book.  We are getting to that time of the year when I can say I cannot think of a better Christmas gift to take to the beach.

They took four days to shoot the tango scene.  No wonder these people hit the skids.