Why Al Pacino almost got fired from The Godfather one week into filming

High above Beverly Hills, just a stone's throw from the sprawling estates of Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, I would occasionally rub shoulders with Hollywood icon Al Pacino at the exclusive hilltop tennis club we frequented.

As bikinied celebrities luxuriated poolside and movie moguls sipped cocktails, Pacino, casually dishevelled and usually clad in black, would sit stiffly on a chaise longue like a tensely wound spring, dark eyes flaring beneath a wild shock of black hair, looking like a hitman scanning the crowd for his target.

Leave the gun, take the cannoli, as the classic Godfather line put it.

Now the notoriously taciturn 84-year-old Oscar winning, scenery-chewing star of classic movies including The Godfather, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Scarface and Heat is finally unclenching his jaw and spilling the beans on an acclaimed career in his new memoir, Sonny Boy - his mother's nickname for him - published this week.

"Objectively, I never knew what the f*** I was doing," he confesses of a career with so many highs and lows, he calls it "anarchic".

Johnny Depp, filming crime drama Donnie Brasco opposite Pacino, told him: "Al, you know you are nuts, right?.... You're certifiable."

Pacino agrees: "I'm not above the occasional outburst of insanity. I am guilty of inconsistency and off-the-wall choices."

But he concedes: "What I lack in intelligence, I make up for in energy."

And his appearance, he insists, can also be deceiving. "There's the general belief that I'm a cocaine addict or was one," he says. "It may surprise you to know I've never touched the stuff."

The gravel-voiced star with a face like a mile of unpaved Sicilian road also explores his reputation for being truculent, difficult to work with, uncomfortable in love scenes, demanding endless rehearsals and retakes, and sometimes being unintelligibly inarticulate. All with some basis in fact, evidently.

But the secret to his success is simple: "I was lucky," he says. "I'm here because I did The Godfather. For an actor, that's like winning the lottery."

Director Francis Ford Coppola wanted Pacino for the role of Mafia don's son Michael Corleone in the 1972 epic, but Paramount studio fought to replace him with a bigger name: Redford, Nicholson or Beatty.

Pacino, a New York stage actor with only one minor film under his belt, admits: "The studios didn't want me, nobody wanted me - nobody knew me."

After barely a week of filming, producers wanted Pacino fired. "I was struggling," he admits. Coppola told him: "You're not cutting it."

In desperation, the director brought forward the shooting of Pacino's powerful scene in which he guns down two mobsters in a restaurant, finally proving his acting chops. "Because of that scene they kept me in the film," he writes. Yet despite the stellar film career that followed, Pacino preferred the stage, and admits: "Movies were difficult things for the first ten years of my career. I kept feeling as though this was not the medium for me."

The Godfather brought overnight success, but he struggled for decades with the pressures that accompanied fame.

Feeling isolated and suffering depression, he says: "The way I dealt with it was I took drugs and drank. I was dealing with tremendous anxiety. Nerves. It was anarchy. I didn't feel a rush. I just felt chaos when I was younger. I'd say, 'What is going on? Give me another drink.' It's taken me a lifetime to accept it and move on."

The Godfather earned Pacino's first of nine Oscar nominations, and his New York cop drama Serpico in 1973 brought his second. But then he turned down bank heist drama Dog Day Afternoon, thinking: "Maybe I just didn't want to be a film actor any more."

He ultimately made the movie, scoring another Oscar nomination.

A "method" actor like Brando and James Dean, Pacino immersed himself in roles 24/7, on screen and off. He met with Mafia dons to research The Godfather, and drug dealers when playing the murderous narcotics kingpin Scarface.

Yet when Scarface was a critical and box office disappointment in 1983, Pacino decided: "My movie career was through... I quit." But after four years away from Hollywood, he made a depressing discovery: "Somehow I had managed to go broke."

Desperate for money, Pacino made hit noir thriller Sea of Love. Suddenly he was back on top, and solvent. Yet he turned his nose up at Hollywood convention. He dressed in such a slovenly way that, even as a millionaire, his grandmother once pressed $700 into his hands and demanded that he buy some new clothes. Scent of a Woman in 1992, playing a gruff blind former US Army officer, finally won his first Academy Award.

Rolling in money again, he spent up to $400,000 a month supporting two homes and an entourage of staff, gifting small fortunes to needy friends, and flying to Europe on a Gulfstream jet.

But a crooked accountant mismanaged Pacino's fortune and by 2011 he again realised: "I was broke. I had $50million, and then I had nothing. I had property, but I didn't have any money."

In his 70s, with big paydays behind him, he was stoic, thinking: "Well, I'm alive."

He sold a home, filmed commercials, and held seminars. "I also ended up doing some really bad films that will go unmentioned, just for the cash." His love life was equally storied and stormy. Pacino romanced actresses including Diane Keaton, Jill Clayburgh, Tuesday Weld, Kathleen Quinlan and Beverly D'Angelo.

A 1989 fling produced daughter Julie, 34, by acting coach Jan Tarrant; twins Anton and Olivia, 23, by D'Angelo; and last year he became a father again at 83, with 'good friend' Noor Alfallah, 30, welcoming son Roman. But he sacrificed long-lasting love for his career. "Work is work, and romance and life come second," he writes. Acting demanded the "need to go in 100 per cent".

He never wed, saying: "Marriage is a state of mind, not a contract. When I think about the law and marriage, I ask myself, when did the cops get involved?" He confesses: "I probably should have got married a couple of times. I wish I would have."

Born to Sicilian parents in New York's Harlem in 1940, Alfredo James Pacino was raised in a small South Bronx apartment with his mentally unwell mother, her parents and several cousins. His father, an insurance agent, abandoned the family when Al was two.

"Living in three rooms with a bunch of Sicilians is not easy," he says.

His passion for acting began young. "I wasn't let out much," he recalls. "I was kept in. And while I was home, I found myself repeating the roles from the movies I saw with my mother."

Accepted to the High School of Performing Arts, he dropped out at 16 to support his ailing mother, working odd jobs as a messenger, theatre usher and furniture mover while auditioning for plays, living "down and out, sleeping in hallways and on floors of theatres".

He rode the early days of fame on booze and drugs, but says he "didn't have any desire for the hard stuff", after seeing two of his best childhood friends die of overdoses.

"I did the tranquillisers, that kind of thing," he told GQ magazine in a 1992 interview.

Though sober now, Pacino claims: "Drinking saved my life. I was able to self-medicate... I used alcohol to ease the pain and emptiness." However, he finally quit booze in 1977, after friends suggested he had a problem and sent him to AA meetings.

"I've been in therapy most of my adult life," he admits, and appears less tightly wound than he once was.

"I don't regret anything. I feel that I've made what I would call mistakes. I picked the wrong movie, or I didn't pursue a character or I played somebody and made some choices... But everything you do is a part of you. And you get something from it."

Those errors include turning down the role of Han Solo in Star Wars - "Yeah, that was my first big mistake" - along with the lead in Pretty Woman, and films by Fellini, Bertolucci and Peckinpah. "They're in the museum of mistakes! All the scripts I rejected!"

He won acclaim for roles in 2019 drama The Irishman and 2021's House of Gucci, and after six decades of acting confesses: "There are days when I really do enjoy it. But there are days when not."

Yet he has five films in the can awaiting release, and is currently filming his version of King Lear.

His health troubles him, however: Pacino suffers impaired vision, aching bones and has lost weight.

Carotid artery surgery damaged a vocal cord and, he claims "I experienced death" - flatlining while fevered with Covid - before being brought back to life.

He ends his memoir with the poignant hope that he reunites with his mother in heaven.

"Hey, Ma," he will say, "see what happened to me?"

Sonny Boy: A Memoir, by Al Pacino (Century, £25) is out now. For free UK P&P, visit or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 383