Robert De Niro

You talkin' to me? Visual biographies of cinema's greatest stars Most moviegoers associate actor Robert De Niro with adjectives like "intense," "violent," "streetwise," and "brooding." It is an image that De Niro has carefully nurtured over the last fifty years of his career. He used gesture, voice, and, most importantly, his mesmerizing eyes to convey to the audience the disturbing emotions with which he imbued his characters, from his earliest films like Mean Streets through classic portraits of violent, disaffected men like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Jake La Motta in Raging Bull up to and including comic tour de forces like the maniacal father in Meet the Parents. De Niro's journey from alienated teen through conflicted stardom and finally to committed activist again replicates the trajectory of many of his characters, who also travel from the depths of despair to some form of redemption, no matter how unconventional. For in De Niro's world, art and reality are often indistinguishable.