Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, was created by director Elia Kazan and the Jewish producer Sam Spiegel and is based on British Jewish playwright Harold Pinter’s screenplay adaptation.

The 1976 film “The Last Tycoon,” based on F. They all taught variants of the Stanislavski system of “Method” acting, of which De Niro became a devoted adherent. Bobby De Niro attended a series of both private and public schools, and while still a teenager he began studying acting with the American Jewish theater luminaries Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg and Herbert Berghof. was born, his parents separated and De Niro Sr. Peggy Guggenheim was a patron and collector of Admiral’s work. His father had studied at the renowned, experimental Black Mountain College, and in the Village, De Niro’s parents’ group of friends included writers Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, playwright Tennessee Williams, and the actress and famous German-Jewish dancer Valeska Gert. Still, De Niro has made a specialty of playing Jews nearly as often as he has Italians, from his early role as Jon Rubin in the 1968 film “Greetings” by a then-unknown director named Brian De Palma, through his recent portrayal of disgraced financier Bernie Madoff in the 2017 HBO movie “The Wizard of Lies.” If anything, De Niro is the one-man embodiment of the cultural kinship between American Jews and Italians, whose immigrant stories often paralleled each other and whose close-knit tribal and familial ties are often remarked on for their similarities.įar from the streetwise characters he has so often portrayed so memorably on celluloid, De Niro himself enjoyed a bohemian upbringing in Manhattan’s artsy Greenwich Village as the son of two painters. Truth is, De Niro himself boasts only one-quarter Italian ancestry: His father, the abstract expressionist painter Robert De Niro Sr., was half Irish, and his mother, painter and poet Virginia Holton Admiral, boasted Dutch, English, French and German ancestry.

An entire subgenre of his work, however, has been devoted to portraying Jewish characters: gangsters and otherwise.įar from being typecast in roles as an Italian American, De Niro has played a whole host of ethnic types, including Jews, Irish and Poles. Actor Robert De Niro, who turns 75 years old August 17, is perhaps best known for playing the roles of Italian gangsters and assorted crazies in his much lauded, 55-year career in film.

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