Al Pacino

Al Pacino was thirty-one and largely unknown when Francis Ford Coppola pushed him into The Godfather in 1972, over considerable objection from the studio. The part - Michael Corleone, who begins the film as the respectable son and ends it as something else entirely - was built on a performance of near-total stillness. It earned him a Best Supporting Actor nomination, which was already an odd classification for a man on screen more than anyone else in the picture, and it set the terms for everything that followed.

What came next was four consecutive years of Academy recognition: Serpico in 1973, The Godfather Part II in 1974, Dog Day Afternoon in 1975. Three lead nominations in a row, none of them converted. ...And Justice for All in 1979 made it five. The roles share a quality that is easy to miss now - all of them are men arguing with an institution and losing the argument. Pacino in the seventies was what American cinema reached for when it wanted to show a system quietly beating someone down.

Scarface arrived in 1983 to reviews ranging from cool to hostile, then spent the next thirty years becoming one of the most quoted films ever made, a reputation assembled almost entirely after the fact. Dick Tracy brought a sixth nomination in 1990 and no win. When the Academy finally settled up it did so awkwardly: at the ceremony held in March 1993 he was nominated twice, supporting for Glengarry Glen Ross and lead for Scent of a Woman. He won for the second, at fifty-two.

The then-and-now comparison for Pacino is mostly a comparison of volume. The seventies performances are quiet to the point of withholding; the later ones are not. Somewhere around Scent of a Woman the whisper became a bark, and it is the bark that impressionists learned. Both are him. The photographs tell a simpler story - the same narrow face, considerably more weathered, still turning up for work. A ninth nomination arrived for The Irishman in 2019, forty-seven years after the first one.