Filmography: Robert De Niro

Robert De Niro won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the young Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II. Six years later, he won his second Oscar, for Best Actor, for his extraordinary portrayal of Jake La Motta in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull.

Mr. De Niro has earned four additional Academy Award nominations, for his performances in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver; in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter; in Penny Marshall’s Awakenings; and in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear.

He launched his prolific motion picture career with Brian De Palma’s The Wedding Party in 1969. In 1973, the near-simultaneous release of John Hancock’s Bang the Drum Slowly and Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets earned Mr. De Niro worldwide acclaim, including, respectively, the New York Film Critics Circle and National Society of Film Critics awards for his portrayals.

His distinguished body of work also includes performances in Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon; Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900; Ulu Grosbard’s True Confessions and Falling in Love; Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America; Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, Casino, and New York, New York; Terry Gilliam’s Brazil; Roland Joffé’s The Mission; Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables; Alan Parker’s Angel Heart; Martin Brest’s Midnight Run; David Jones’ Jacknife; Martin Ritt’s Stanley & Iris; Ron Howard’s Backdraft; Michael Caton-Jones’ This Boy’s Life and City By the Sea; Kenneth Branagh‘s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Michael Mann‘s Heat; Barry Levinson‘s Sleepers, Wag the Dog, and What Just Happened; James Mangold’s Cop Land; Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations; Quentin Tarantino‘s Jackie Brown; John Frankenheimer’s Ronin; Kirk Jones’ Everybody’s Fine; John Curran’s Stone; Neil Burger’s Limitless; Rodrigo Cortés’ soon-to-be-released Red Lights; and The Comic, to be directed by Sean Penn. Read more

Forbes Lists ‘The Hardest Working Actors in Show Business’

Forbes Magazine always likes to put together all kinds of “most successful” lists.  Of course, Forbes’ latest list, which is supposed to list the Hardest Working Actors in Show Business, has interesting criteria.  “To come up with our list we looked at all movies that earned more than $20 million since 2007″ and picked the actors who have appeared in the most $20 million+ grossing films since (not counting animated films). 

Some of the choices are the usual suspects, but there are also some surprises.

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Q & A: ‘Terra Nova’ star Jason O’Mara on how he got the part, the challenges he had to face and the difficulties of shooting on location

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:41 — 17.0MB)

After some highly publicized delays, rewrites and re-shoots, Steven Spielberg‘s Terra Nova finally comes to the small screen this Monday in a big two-hour première on FOX.

The show, starring Jason O’Mara and Stephen Lang, is set in the year 2149 at a time when humankind is threatened with extinction. In an effort to save the human race, scientists develop a time machine that opens a portal 85 million years to prehistoric Earth.

The Shannon family, Jim and Elizabeth and their three children, travel through the portal to establish a new human colony in hopes of saving the future earth.

Jason, whose credits include In Justice and Life on Mars, stars as Jim Shannon, “a devoted father with a checkered past who guides his family through this new world of limitless beauty, mystery and terror.” And dinosaurs. Yes!

I talked to Jason in a conference call about how he got the part, the acting challenges he had to face and the difficulties of shooting on location for months at a time.

Follow Jason on Twitter!

Terra Nova airs on Mondays at 8/7c on FOX

For the full interview, click the audio link above or download it from iTunes

How did this part and this show come to you?

Jason O’Mara: Well, to be perfectly honest it was one of those kind of things that was—okay, let me start at the beginning.  I was in London doing a play at the Donmar Warehouse.

What play?

Jason O’Mara: It was called Serenading Louie.  It was an off-Broadway play from like 1972, I think, or ’73, that was being revived and I did it with Jason Butler Harner, who is a great American actor.  I think he’s going to be in Alcatraz on Fox in the mid-season.  Simon Curtis directed it, who’s married to Elizabeth McGovern and he’s directed a lot of stuff recently, actually.  He’s just directed My Week with Marilyn, which is coming out soon. 

I really had a great time, but I really felt—I had skipped pilot season because I was in London for all of that and I thought that Hollywood had completely moved on and had lost interest in me, which would have been fine, you know, whatever.  Things go in cycles.  I came back and my agent called me and said, “Just so you know I’ve had several conversations with Dreamworks and Fox about a production that they’re working on called Terra Nova and Steven Spielberg is highly involved in the casting and is signing off on everything related to the production.  That’s a hoop that we need to jump through before we progress any further.”   Read more

You Are Your Own Channel – Stay Plugged In!

Written by Anthony Meindl

Start with yourself.

If you start anywhere else, it’s a false start and you’ll just be forced to go back to the starting line and begin again. And again. (Sort of like USAIN BOLT false-starting & being DQ’d at the World Track & Field Championships yesterday.)

Starting with yourself means finding the place within you that is not influenced by outside forces. It’s not affected by what other people say or do. It’s not discouraged by people wanting to stop you. It’s not even concerned with the negative things you say about yourself, which come from the conditioned part of our left brain.

When I was in my 20’s I spent a great amount of time running away from who I was; always trying to be someone else: wanting to be liked, or popular, or cool, or attractive.
But no matter how hard I tried to avoid myself, I kept coming back to me. By my 30’s I realized that who I was – who we all are – is the thing we keep looking for somewhere else.

In someone else.

Our essential Self (which makes each of us unique) is the part of us that is connected to something bigger than our egos. It’s like you are one of those limitless channels, plugged into the TV.   Read more

Bradley Cooper: “The goal is not to achieve success. The goal is to grow.”

Hangover Part II star Bradley Cooper covered a lot of varied ground in his interview with the Wall Street Journal this week.  Cooper is out promoting the Blu-ray and DVD release of Limitless, but he spent much of his time speaking about his opinion on the quality of The Hangover Part II and on his future in acting.

In particular, when Cooper is asked about the critical lashing that The Hangover Part II received (with many critics complaining that it was too similar to the first film), Cooper replies “It definitely perplexed me because to me, it’s not even a question that it’s a better movie than the first one. On every level I just think you’re watching a director evolve. It’s a much more complicated film. It’s a funnier movie. There’s better acting in it, the story’s more compelling. It’s just in every way a more sophisticated film. I think the only thing that it doesn’t have is the freshness of the first one because it was the first one. So, I was more just sort of like wow, it’s interesting, sometimes people just pan things because they’re supposed to, really.”  Cooper isn’t exactly clear what he means by the critics panning the film “because they’re supposed to,” but he does continue to strongly support Hangover director Todd Phillips when he is asked about the possibility of The Hangover Part III and answers “Well, I would do anything that Todd Phillips says.”

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Clip: ‘Limitless’ starring Bradley Cooper

Here’s a clip from Limitless, the Bradley Cooper film about a guy who discovers a top-secret drug which gives him super human abilities.

Cooper takes on a bunch of thugs… and kicks their butts. From the clip, some of his powers are almost Matrix-like.

The film, which also stars Robert De Niro, Abbie Cornish and Anna Friel, opens March 18th.

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Trailer: ‘Arthur’ starring Russell Brand and Helen Mirren

Arthur: Irresponsible charmer Arthur Bach has always relied on two things to get by: his limitless fortune and the good sense of lifelong nanny Hobson to keep him out of trouble. Now he faces his biggest challenge — choosing between an arranged marriage that will ensure his lavish lifestyle or an uncertain future with the one thing money can’t buy, Naomi, the only woman he has ever loved. With Naomi’s inspiration and some unconventional help from Hobson, Arthur will take the most expensive risk of his life and finally learn what it means to become a man.

Director: Jason Winer

Cast: Russell Brand, Helen Mirren, Greta Gerwig, Jennifer Garner

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Christian McKay: From Concert Pianist to Orson Wells

From wallstreetjournal.com

The Wall Street Journal: Despite having an injury, Richard Linklater expressly flew to New York to catch your final performance in “Rosebud” to check out your acting. That must have been exciting.

Christian McKay: It was one of those things that I’ve read about, that divine luck that actors sometimes get — but mostly not. I mean, I’ve a very lucky person and I’ve had a very contented life, but I always thought that kind of luck was beyond me. With his coming to see me, I had my own little Cinderella moment, my word.

Consequently, he invited you down to Austin for a good old-fashioned screen test.

It was marvelous. Actually on the plane down, the woman who was sitting next me to asking why I was going to Texas, and [after I told her], we spent the entire flight chatting about his films. At that time, I only knew about four or five of them, so it was a great pleasure to work with Rick and then go and check out his films and be astonished by them. I was particularly astonished by “Waking Life”;  I love that film. Rick is an emblem of that wonderful American tradition of the maverick — like how Orson was a maverick, but Rick can move form one genre to another with total ease.

And how was working with Rick?

He’s a great actor’s director and a great actor himself; he’d hate me for saying that, but I think it’s true. He’s a wonderful storyteller — he has that in common with the old man. He taught me how to act on film. For an old stage ham [like me], that was a difficult job. The gestures of the stage would be death on film, and I had a very technical job to achieve. I’m playing a theatrical, larger-than-life character, so I don’t want to be subdued. Film is limitless, but some stage presentations on film can look too theatrical.

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