AL PACINO MY LIFE IN 10 Pictures

GROWING UP in NYC, Alfredo James Pacino “was very shy, and when I was about 3 years old my mother began taking me to the movies, night after night,” he told Esquire.

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“The next day, all by myself, I would enact all the parts of the movie before a mirror.... It had a tremendous influence on my becoming an actor.” After dropping out of high school and paying his dues in theater, Al would play to a much wider audience — winning a pair of Tonys, two Emmys and an Oscar. Now the driving force for Al, who turns 85 on April 25, is his four kids — Julie, 35, twins Anton and Olivia, 24, and son Roman, who turns two in June. His youngest has given Al a new look at life. “I want to be around for this child. And I hope I am,” he shared with USA Today. “Everything he does is real. Everything he does is interesting to me.”

1 1969 PLAY TIME Al won a Tony for his Broadway debut as a drug addict in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? “It was a very important play for me,” he'd reflect. “Francis Ford Coppola saw it, contacted me and said he had a script that was a love story...It didn’t get made, [but] I got to know him. The next year he called me with a film. It was The Godfather.”

2 1972 MOB SCENE For Al, getting to act alongside James Caan, Marlon Brando and future Dog Day Afternoon co-star John Cazale in