DE NIRO A BIOGRAPHY
Robert De Niro is the pre-eminent Hollywood character performer of our time: film portraits like the young Don Vito Corleone in THE GODFATHER II, Jake La Motta in RAGING BULL and Travis Bickle in TAXI DRIVER are some of the most vivid ever put on celluloid. De Niro cannot be cast to type, prefers to work for old friends like Martin Scorsese, and (apart from FRANKENSTEIN) has never played anything but 20th-century roles. John Baxter calls him 'the archetypal empty bottle which only becomes visible when it's filled by a role': which makes him such a tempting subject for one of Hollywood's finest historian/biographers.