Martin Scorsese

Info

Full Name: Martin Scorsese
Date of birth: November 17, 1942 (83 years old)
Location: Queens, New York
Country: USA

Martin Scorsese has been active for 54 years, participating in 74 movies that average a 7.5/10 score.

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Biography

An asthmatic boy who could not chase a ball spent his childhood watching the street from the window of a Little Italy flat and the screens of neighbourhood cinemas. That boy wavered for years between God and the movies, entered a junior seminary and left within a year. Cinema can thank fate: those streets supplied the themes of an entire body of work, guilt, violence and redemption. Martin Scorsese, born in Queens, New York, on 17 November 1942, grandson of four Sicilian immigrants, would end up becoming the greatest living American film director. His parents, Charles and Catherine, garment workers by trade, would end up appearing in his films: his mother's improvised dinner scene in Goodfellas is already the stuff of legend.

From Little Italy to the Palme d'Or

He swapped the priesthood for New York University, where he shot his first short films and, while still barely out of his twenties, his debut feature, 'Who's That Knocking at My Door' (1967). After an apprenticeship with Roger Corman, John Cassavetes' advice pushed him to make something personal: 'Mean Streets' (1973), with Harvey Keitel and a young Robert De Niro, the film that began modern cinema's most fertile partnership.

After directing Ellen Burstyn to an Oscar in 'Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore' (1974), the seed of a popular sitcom, he delivered one of the summits of film history: 'Taxi Driver' (1976), winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, written by Paul Schrader, with De Niro as the sleepless cabbie Travis Bickle, a teenage Jodie Foster and that improvised "You talkin' to me?" in the mirror that the whole world still repeats. Its shadow stretched so far that John Hinckley cited it after shooting President Reagan, obsessed with the film's Foster.

The failure of the musical 'New York, New York' (1977) dragged him into a cocaine spiral that nearly killed him in 1978. It was De Niro who visited him in hospital and convinced him to get back up by filming the story of boxer Jake LaMotta. 'Raging Bull' (1980), shot in ferocious black and white and regularly voted the best film of the eighties, earned eight Oscar nominations, won De Niro the statuette and, as he has repeated ever since, saved his life. He dedicated it to Haig Manoogian, the NYU teacher who taught him to believe in himself. Since then, moreover, he has never cut a film without Thelma Schoonmaker, his career-long editor and a three-time Oscar winner. In between he left behind what many call the greatest concert film ever made, 'The Last Waltz' (1978), The Band's farewell to the stage.

The chronicler of crime (and much more)

The eighties showed him restless: the uncomfortable fame satire of 'The King of Comedy' (1982), the nocturnal nightmare of 'After Hours' (1985), which won him Best Director at Cannes, and 'The Color of Money' (1986), the sequel to 'The Hustler' that finally won Paul Newman his Oscar. In 1988 he dared to make the thorny 'The Last Temptation of Christ', again scripted by Schrader, which sparked religious protests across half the world and proved that his faith and his Catholic guilt, far from deserting him, remained the secret engine of his cinema. That same year, incidentally, he directed Michael Jackson in the 'Bad' music video.

In 1990 he signed his criminal masterpiece: 'Goodfellas', the rise and fall of mobster Henry Hill with De Niro and an Oscar winning Joe Pesci, considered by many the most influential crime film since 'The Godfather', its Copacabana tracking shot studied in every film school and its place in the National Film Registry long secured. There followed the terror of 'Cape Fear' (1991), with a tattooed and again Oscar nominated De Niro, the elegant flipside of his New York in 'The Age of Innocence' (1993) with Daniel Day-Lewis, the murderous neon of 'Casino' (1995), reuniting De Niro and Pesci in Las Vegas with an unleashed Sharon Stone, and the spiritual 'Kundun' (1997), about the Dalai Lama, plus the ambulance frenzy of 'Bringing Out the Dead' (1999), scripted once more by Schrader with Nicolas Cage at the wheel.

Along the way he showed his acting side too: he is the disturbed passenger of his own Taxi Driver, played Van Gogh in 'Akira Kurosawa's Dreams' (1990) and appeared in 'Quiz Show' (1994), and years later he would voice the mobster pufferfish of 'Shark Tale' (2004).

DiCaprio and the Oscar, at last

The new century brought him a second on-screen alter ego: Leonardo DiCaprio. Together they raised the monumental 'Gangs of New York' (2002), a project nursed for decades and built full scale at the Cinecittà studios, facing Daniel Day-Lewis' butcher, and 'The Aviator' (2004), the Howard Hughes biopic that gathered eleven nominations and won Cate Blanchett her Oscar.

Poetic justice arrived with 'The Departed' (2006), his reworking of the Hong Kong thriller 'Infernal Affairs', a Boston cat and mouse game between cops and mobsters with DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson and company: after five defeats, the Academy finally handed him the Oscar for Best Director, along with Best Picture. When he climbed the steps to collect it, half of Hollywood rose to its feet.

Far from coasting, he strung together the mental labyrinth of 'Shutter Island' (2010), his 3D love letter to the pioneer Georges Méliès, 'Hugo' (2011), winner of five Oscars, and the stockbroking frenzy of 'The Wolf of Wall Street' (2013), his biggest box office hit with nearly 400 million grossed. On television, he godfathered 'Boardwalk Empire', winning an Emmy for directing its pilot, and co-created the series 'Vinyl' with Mick Jagger.

Then he shot the project he had chased for almost three decades, the Jesuit mission in seventeenth century Japan of 'Silence' (2016), finally reunited De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci in the twilight epic 'The Irishman' (2019), Netflix's digital de-aging experiment, which walked away empty handed from ten Oscar nominations, and joined his two favourite actors in 'Killers of the Flower Moon' (2023), the three and a half hour drama about the Osage murders, premiered at Cannes, that earned ten Oscar nominations and introduced Lily Gladstone to the wider world. That made it ten films with De Niro and six with DiCaprio, and few directors have handed out so many statuettes to others: five performers have won Oscars under his direction.

The keeper of cinema's memory

Few have done as much for film beyond the set. In 1990 he created The Film Foundation, alongside colleagues such as Steven Spielberg, which has restored hundreds of endangered classics, and in 2007 the World Cinema Project, devoted to the film heritage of the whole planet. A compulsive documentarian, he has portrayed the Rolling Stones in 'Shine a Light' (2008) and George Harrison in 'George Harrison: Living in the Material World' (2011), which won him two Emmys, plus Bob Dylan in 'No Direction Home' and 'Rolling Thunder Revue', faithful to a life soundtrack in which the Rolling Stones ring out almost as often as the violins of his period dramas.

His ten Oscar nominations for Best Director, more than any other living filmmaker, sit beside the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Honors and the honorary Golden Bear the Berlinale gave him in 2024. None of it has mellowed him: in 2019 he lit the decade's loudest debate by declaring that superhero movies are not cinema but theme parks, a stance he later refined in an essay for The New York Times. In October 2025, Apple TV+ premiered 'Mr. Scorsese', the five part documentary series by Rebecca Miller that revisits his life with the help of De Niro, DiCaprio, Spielberg and his own family. And at 83 he is shooting 'What Happens at Night' in the Czech Republic, an icy mystery for Apple about a marriage coming undone in a remote European hotel, from Peter Cameron's novel, with DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Mads Mikkelsen.

Five marriages and a TikTok star

His personal life has been as intense as his films. He has married five times: to Laraine Brennan, to the writer Julia Cameron, mother of his daughter Domenica, an occasional actress in her father's films, to the actress Isabella Rossellini between 1979 and 1983, to the producer Barbara De Fina and, since 1999, to the book editor Helen Morris, mother of his youngest daughter, Francesca.

It is Francesca, a filmmaker herself, who has gifted him an unexpected third youth: her TikTok videos quizzing her father on Gen Z slang, which he plays along with in endearing bafflement, turned him into an accidental idol of a whole new generation, which discovered that America's most serious director is also a charming grandfather with razor sharp comic timing.

The boy who was going to be a priest ended up officiating another liturgy: that of the dark room. And judging by his energy, and by a shooting schedule that would exhaust directors half his age, the final homily is still to be written.