Occupation: Director
Also: producer, screenwriter, actor
Born: November 17, 1942 in Queens, New York
Education: Cathedral College (Seminary); New York University

Martin Scorsese is the most consistently passionate, committed and inventive director to have worked in the American cinema over the past 20 years. His films are often rooted in his own experience, exploring his Italian-American Catholic heritage and confronting the themes of sin and redemption in a fiercely contemporary, yet universally resonant fashion.

Scorsese has worked largely outside the traditional Hollywood establishment, making films on relatively small budgets which attract relatively small, yet dedicated, audiences. Although he has never enjoyed the box-office success of a Godfather or a Star Wars, he has earned an almost uninterrupted run of critical kudos that has made him the envy of many of his peers.

Scorsese was raised in New York's Little Italy and flirted with the idea of the priesthood, even studying at Cathedral College, a junior seminary. Rather than devote himself to the Church, he enrolled in New York University and soon discovered the religion of film. By 1966, Scorsese had received his master's degree, shot several successful short films including It's Not Just You, Murray, an ironic portrait of a gangster, and commenced production on a feature titled Who's That Knocking at My Door?. The film was shown at the 1967 Chicago Film Festival but failed to gain theatrical release at the time.

In 1969, after having spent some time in the Netherlands, Scorsese was teaching film history classes at NYU and helping fellow student Michael Wadleigh edit the mammoth rock documentary Woodstock. His career was boosted when producer Joseph Brenner offered to distribute Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1968). With a gratuitous sex scene thrown in, the film was released in New York that year. It stars Harvey Keitel as J.R., an Italian-American who has been conditioned by his strict Catholic upbringing to see all women as either "girls" (virgins who make good wives and mothers) or "broads" (purely sexual creatures about whom he fantasizes). The film was critically praised for its realism and inspired camera work.

After working on the documentary Street Scenes (1970), Scorsese was assigned by Roger Corman to direct Boxcar Bertha (1972), a Depression-era allegory which parallels within the limitations of an exploitation picture the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ. Barbara Hershey (who gave Scorsese a copy of the novel Last Temptation of Christ during filming and would play Mary Magdalene in Scorsese's film of that book) plays Bertha, a good-natured whore, and David Carradine is labor leader Bill Shelley who, at the film's end, is literally crucified on the side of a boxcar. The film introduced one of Scorsese's central thematic concerns, the figure of the "sinner" who has temporarily slipped from grace, only to enjoy a final, if ambiguous, redemption.

In 1973 came the film that assured Scorsese a starring role in contemporary film history: Mean Streets, the story of a group of young hoods living and dying on the streets of New York (shot, surprisingly, almost entirely in Los Angeles). Charlie (Keitel), the film's central character, juggles his concern for his crazy friend Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), a secret romance with Johnny's cousin, and his ambition to run an uptown restaurant. At his best here, Scorsese combines a cineaste's passion for film noir with an actor's obsession with rich characters and a loving sense of time and place. The film was Scorsese's first with De Niro (the two were raised in the same neighborhood) and marked the beginning of one of the most creative pairings in contemporary American cinema. De Niro would star in five more Scorsese features: Taxi Driver (1976), New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983) and GoodFellas (1990).

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) marked a departure, if not an act of penance, for Scorsese it is his only film with a woman protagonist and one of very few that isn't suffused with a particularly masculine point of view. The story of a woman (Ellen Burstyn) who takes off with her young son in search of America and a job ironically became a favorite of the nascent women's movement of the early 1970s; it also spawned a successful sitcom.

As if in reaction to the feminism of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Scorsese returned with a vengeance to the macho world of Mean Streets with Taxi Driver (1976). Scripted by Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver was an iconographic street opera which gave De Niro an opportunity for a tour-de-force performance as Travis Bickle, a Vietnam vet turned psychotic vigilante. The film generated considerable controversy, largely thanks to its bloody denouementa sustained, hallucinatory, brilliantly edited piece of carnage centering around a 12-year-old prostitute (Jodie Foster). The pendulum swung the other way with New York, New York (1977), an extravagant, uneven 1940s-style musical rooted in Scorsese's childhood memories of the "Make-Believe-Ballroom" era.

Raging Bull (1980) remains Scorsese's acknowledged masterpiece. Based on the autobiography of Jake La Motta and scripted by Schrader and Mardik Martin, the film afforded De Niro the greatest performance of his career in this story of the rise and fall of a middleweight boxing champion (De Niro gained 70 pounds to play La Motta later in life, as a nightclub performer). Shot in black-and-white save for some poignant "home movie" sequences, Raging Bull won Academy Awards for De Niro and editor Thelma Schoonmaker. (Schoonmaker has stated that her much-praised work in editing the film's horrific, but compelling slow-motion fight sequences was all predetermined by Scorsese's fastidious shot composition.)

The King of Comedy (1983), with De Niro as Rupert Pupkin, an obsessed fan/would-be comic, Sandra Bernhardt as his wacko accomplice and Jerry Lewis as a Johnny Carson-type figure in perhaps Scorsese's most underrated film, a dark but pointed social comedy. Layered between these features were several documentary projects, most notably Italianamerican (1974), a short but rich portrait of his parents, Charles and Catherine Scorsese (who later went on to make memorable cameo appearances in a number of their son's movies), and The Last Waltz (1978), a meticulously shot and edited record of the 1976 farewell concert by rock group "The Band". After a false start on his long-planned adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese temporarily turned away from high-rolling, big-budget filmmaking to make After Hours (1985), a nightmarish black comedy set entirely on the streets of New York during one night.

In 1986 he abandoned New York for the streets of Chicago to direct The Color of Money, a bloodless but stylish sequel to Robert Rossen's 1961 classic, The Hustler. Part of his reason for directing the film, said Scorsese, was to prove that he could make a "studio picture," with a big budget ($15 million) and stars Paul Newman, Tom Cruise to match.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) gave Scorsese the chance to dramatize the historical figure whose struggle between the spiritual and the secular is the most celebrated of all. Scorsese's Christ begins as a social outcast, reviled for making crucifixes, who wavers between good and evil, between the spirit and the flesh, before eventually choosing the path to redemption. In this sense, Christ has an affinity with Keitel's J.R. and Charlie, De Niro's Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin, and David Carradine's Bill Shelley. Yet despite superbly shot, exotic locations and an infectious "world music" score contributed by Peter Gabriel, the film lacked the emotional power of Scorsese's earlier, smaller-scale productions.

Adapted from Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguys, about the experiences of small-time gangster-turned-Federal-witness Henry Hill, Goodfellas (1990) marked a return to classic Scorsese form and content. The film captures both the undeniable excitement as well as the tawdry, daily details of life on the fringes of "the mob," pushing audience manipulation to the extreme by juxtaposing moments of graphic violence with scenes of high humor. Superb camerawork, including several extended tracking shots, and consummate performances by De Niro, Joe Pesci, Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco, make the film among the finest of Scorsese's achievements, a virtuoso memory of the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s on the Mean Streets of New York.

Copyright (c) 1993 Microsoft Corp.