One of the most gifted actors of the postwar generation and often regarded as Marlon Brando's heir, Max combines the qualities of exceptional movie actors--danger, unpredictability, magnetism--with a distinctive touch of nihilism. The son of abstract expressionist artist Max and painter Virginia Admiral, he studied drama with Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg and appeared in several Off-Broadway productions early in his career. De Niro's first screen appearances came in films directed by Brian De Palma; his roles in "Greetings" (1968), "The Wedding Party" (1969) and "Hi, Mom!" (1970) displayed signs of the defiance and irreverence which typified his later work. Other glimpses of what would become signature De Niro characteristics were visible in his portrayals of a moody, drug-addicted criminal in "Bloody Mama" (1970) and a charmingly roguish small-time thief in "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" (1971).

De Niro was riveting as a slow-witted, dying baseball player in "Bang the Drum Slowly" (1973). Many critics, however, date his breakthrough to his small gem of a performance in Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" (1973), as the irresponsible--and irrepressible--Johnny Boy. In "The Godfather, Part II" (1974), De Niro faced the challenge of depicting a young version of one of cinema's most familiar characters--Don Vito Corleone, originally played by Brando. De Niro's performance, which won him a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award, was a masterpiece of nuanced gestures, glances and speech patterns that captured the pride and inner reserve of Brando's mature Godfather. An equally astonishing portrayal was his enigmatic steelworker-turned-Green Beret in Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" (1978), a compelling central performance that held the entire film together and brought him his first Best Actor Oscar nomination.

The De Niro-Scorsese collaboration has produced some of modern American cinema's most memorable performances--the deranged Travis Bickle in "Taxi Driver" (1976, for which he was again nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award), the jazz saxophonist Jimmy Doyle in "New York, New York" (1977), the boxer Jake La Motta in "Raging Bull" (1980, a tour de force which won him a Best Actor Oscar), the frustrated comic Rupert Pupkin in "The King of Comedy" (1983) and the small-time mobster Jimmy Conway in "GoodFellas" (1990). Remarkably, De Niro recorded the reprehensible qualities of these characters without losing sight of their humanity. Travis Bickle's crazed in-the-mirror monologue ("You talkin' to me?"), so chilling because it is so recognizably human, became a touchstone of modern technique.

De Niro is at his best when he can suggest a man on the edge, struggling with his demons, as he did with the obsessed but kindhearted bounty hunter in "Midnight Run" (1988) and the caring but mercurial Vietnam veteran in "Jacknife" (1989). Just the suggestion of this struggle made his loony rebel cameo in "Brazil" (1985) memorable and has allowed him to create effective characters in films that were otherwise less than entirely successful: the ambitious monsignor in "True Confessions" (1981); the reflective gangster in "Once Upon a Time in America" (1984); and the militant Jesuit priest in "The Mission" (1986). His attempts at playing unambiguously evil characters ("Angel Heart" and "The Untouchables" both 1987) have been less fruitful, as have his portrayals of passive figures ("The Last Tycoon" and "1900" both 1976, "Falling in Love" 1984, "Stanley and Iris" 1990).

De Niro has become less selective in his recent film roles, reportedly in an effort to finance his own film and TV projects. He contributed little that was new or revealing to Penny Marshall's "Awakenings" (1990, yet remarkably garnered a Best Actor Oscar nomination) and barely broke a sweat for Ron Howard's "Backdraft" (1991). Even his seventh collaboration with Scorsese, "Cape Fear" (1991), was a marked step down. Improbably combining disparate elements of two celebrated Robert Mitchum performances (in the original "Cape Fear" 1962 and "Night of the Hunter" 1955), De Niro created a Max Cady who was more monster than man. His increasingly bizarre and malicious antics as he bedevils the family of Nick Nolte seemed more appropriate for a Brian De Palma black comedy or John Carpenter potboiler than a work by a leading "serious" filmmaker. Still the Academy members honored him with his fifth Best Actor nomination. Nonetheless De Niro's name continued to signify "Quality" to many reviewers and audiences. De Niro's notoriety, however, has rarely translated into box-office success for his non-Scorsese-directed vehicles.

Although the early 90s proved rocky for his acting career, with a series of films that made little impact with the press or public, the period did mark his first flowering as a filmmaker. De Niro enhanced his reputation as a champion of New York film production with his TriBeCa Film Center (home to his own TriBeCa Films company), which became a hub of the city's nascent resurgent production community. In 1992, he produced actor Barry Primus' low-budget directorial debut "Mistress", as well as Michael Apted's more ambitious "Thunderheart". The former, in which De Niro portrayed an urbane film financier, was largely dismissed as a poor man's version of "The Player" while the latter, in which De Niro did not appear, was a rather well-received fact-inspired story of a Native American FBI agent grappling with questions of identity while working on a culturally sensitive case.

De Niro segued into TV production as the executive producer of "Tribeca" (Fox, 1993), a short-lived dramatic anthology series set and shot on the streets of downtown NYC. He employed the talents of several actors turned directors--Primus, Melanie Mayron and Joe Morton--to helm some episodes. He then made his own feature directorial debut with "A Bronx Tale" (1993), on which he also served as producer and co-star. Adapted and expanded from a one-man show by actor-writer Chazz Palminteri, the film depicted a boy's divided loyalties to his two heroes in an Italian-American community of the Bronx in the 60s. Palminteri won notice for his central portrayal of a flashy neighborhood gangster while De Niro uncharacteristically played the less flamboyant role of the honest laborer father. Despite a troubled and extended production, the film earned respectful reviews if tepid box-office receipts.

De Niro had appeared in films produced by Irwin Winkler as far back as 1971's "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight", so it seemed natural for him to star in Winkler's feature debut as a writer-director, "Guilty by Suspicion" (1991). This overly familiar tale of the Hollywood Blacklist was mediocre in execution, and De Niro failed to rise above it with his portrayal of a hotshot director. TriBeCa produced Winkler's next directorial outing, an adequate updating of the 1950 film noir classic "Night and the City" (1992), starring De Niro as a frenetic ambulance-chasing lawyer who attempts to make a score as a boxing promoter. He received generally positive notices but some reviewers found him too old for the part and thought that he and female lead Jessica Langelacked chemistry.

The romantic comedy-drama "Mad Dog and Glory" (1993) offered a change of pace as De Niro played a nebbishy crime scene photographer for the Chicago Police Department who saves the life of an exuberant and stylish gangster (Bill Murray). The urbane thug shows his appreciation by lending him a lovely bartender from his club (Uma Thurman for a week. Of course, the pair fall in love. This role marked a rare instance in which De Niro was effective as a sympathetic romantic partner. His performance in "This Boy's Life" (also 1993) returned to more familiar psychological territory--albeit with a rustic twist. As Dwight Hansen, the dreaded stepfather of the young Toby Wolff (Leonardo DiCaprio), De Niro segued nicely from an eccentric rube to a terrifying authoritarian, though young DiCaprio won the film's best notices.

After the commercial disappointment of "A Bronx Tale", De Niro tried his hand at headlining what must have appeared to be a commercial project at the time, "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" (1994). The press buzzed about what interpretation the esteemed Method actor would bring to the cinema's most famous creature. De Niro proved effective as an articulate and sympathetic monster, but the film suffered from director Kenneth Branagh's over-the-top operatic pretensions and died at the box office. A reteaming with Scorsese and "Raging Bull" co-star Joe Pescifor "Casino" (1995), a violent tale of gangsters in 1960s Las Vegas, offered the opportunity for a return to form. De Niro commanded the screen with his portrayal of a transplanted Chicago bookie who experiences both his greatest success and failure in that fabled city in the desert. He then wrapped up 1995 opposite Al Pacino-the first onscreen pairing of this powerhouse duo who had no scenes together in Francis Ford Coppola's classic sequel "The Godfather, Part II" (1974)--in Michael Mann's highly stylized crime drama "Heat". Here he was a hardened career criminal pursued by Pacino's driven police detective.

De Niro returned to the world of the psychotic with the title role in Tony Scott's artistically bankrupt "The Fan" (1996), arguably the nadir of his career. Perhaps the original idea seemed palatable enough, to create some synthesis of Travis Bickle and Max Cady as a family man gone 'round the bend to stalk a major league player (Wesley Snipes), but the resulting movie was an absolute embarrassment with little to redeem it. That same year he produced and played Diane Keaton's whimsical doctor in the comedy-drama "Marvin's Room", as well as contributing his stoic priest to Barry Levinson's "Sleepers". After teaming with Sylvester Stallonein the predictable police drama "Cop Land" (1997), De Niro finished that year strong with Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown" (adapted from the Elmore Leonard novel "Rum Punch") and Levinson's "Wag the Dog", which he also produced. In the former, he was Samuel L Jackson's L.A. gangster pal, while in the latter, he hired Dustin Hoffman to stage an imaginary war and divert public attention from a president's sexual indiscretion.

De Niro transformed himself niftily from bullying escaped prisoner to refined, engaging benefactor in a modern-day remake of Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations" and made a passable action star to carry John Frankenheimer's "Ronin" (both 1998). For his own TriBeCa productions, he flexed his comedy muscles opposite Billy Crystalas a New York gangland boss experiencing panic attacks in "Analyze This" before throwing himself into his portrayal of a stroke victim for Joel Schumacher's "Flawless" (both 1999), a small-scale dramedy in which his character's slurred speech leads him to take singing lessons from and develop an unlikely camaraderie with the drag queen upstairs (Philip Seymour Hoffman. In 2000, he also produced and played Fearless Leader in the combined live-action/animated "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle" and reverted to police work as a highly decorated detective who teams with a fire inspector (Edward Burns) to investigate a murder committed by fame-seeking serial killers in "15 Minutes" (2001). Casting about for a second film to helm, De Niro will had to wait until acting projects "Men of Honor" and "Meet the Parents" (both 2000) and Frank Oz's "The Score" (2001), for which he reportedly received $15 million, to clear the pipeline.

The roles kept coming for De Niro, who starred in three films in 2002, including the sequel "Analyze That." He also began working on another anticipated sequel, "Meet the Fockers," the follow-up to "Meet the Parents."