3. Taxi Driver (1976)
Taxi Driver is a Martin Scorsese directorial crime film. It casts Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd, Peter Boyle, and Albert Brooks. It portrays De Niro as fury and frustration–driven Travis Bickle. Bickle is a former U.S. marine and starts a job of Taxi driver. He falls in love with a political campaign volunteer, but later impelled to be away from her.
Witnessing the prostitution and crime in the city and accompanied by his loneliness, he turns into violence. In this course, he kills gangsters and helps a teenage prostitute to quit her job. This movie unveiled the powerful and passionate performance of De Niro. For this movie’s coordinated performance, script, story and amazing direction, it earned four nominations for Academy Awards.
2. Raging Bull (1980)
Raging Bull shows another consummate performance from De Niro. Obsessed with the perfection, he gained 60 lb and studied boxing for this movie. Raging Bull (1980) is a biographical sports drama film , an adaptation of Jake LaMotta’s autobiography Raging Bull: My Story, directed by Martin Scorsese. De Niro plays the role of Middleweight boxer, Jake LaMotta, whose wrathful and self-destructive manner helps him to succeed in boxing, but impairs his relation with Joey, his brother and manager, and Vickie, his wife.
De Niro is highly praised for his acting as he is able to characterize LaMotta with such perfection and, thus, bagged Academy Awards for Best Actor, even though movie was not that successful commercially.
1. The Godfather II (1974)
The Godfather Part II, a crime epic, presents De Niro as a young Vito Corleone, Mafia don, along with Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton. The movie , viewed as both sequel and prequel to The Godfather, was produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and depicts the struggle of Vito Corleone in New-York to become an important figure of the underworld as a prequel.
Meanwhile, it tells the story of Michael Corleone (Pacino), son of Vito, and his efforts to strengthen the Corleone legacy as a sequel to previous movie. It is looked upon as one of the finest movie of gangster genre. De Niro received Academy Award for Best Actor from this for his spectacular performance in this movie.
Conclusion
Robert De Niro has appeared in different genres of movies which include action, thriller and comedy; portraying different roles of feisty, angry young man, violent gangster, super-cool, light-hearted guy etc. In every movie, he is at his best fully encompassing the role he is playing. De Niro has been successful to mesmerize the audiences through the inexorable perfectionism of his approach to his work, giving the likes of The Godfather II, Taxi Driver, The Raging Bull; some of the most critically-acclaimed and awe-inspiring movies of all time.