His memoir ‘Sonny Boy’ recounts some of his most memorable days in Hollywood, including his rise to fame after ‘The Godfather’ and many celebrity encounters
is getting candid about his storied career in film, his many encounters with iconic figures in Hollywood over the years and some of the most traumatic moments of his life in his new memoir.
In his book out Oct. 15 from Penguin Press, Pacino, 84, opens about many of his encounters with celebrities — some of whom he considers close friends — as well as the more difficult situations he has found himself in over the years, including his battle with alcoholism and his mother’s mental health struggles.
“It was due,” of his decision to write the memoir. “I’m in my 85th year. When you get there and you start experiencing age, you understand why they do put things down.”
The Scarface actor titled the book after the childhood nickname his mother, Rose, gave him from the Al Jolson song of the same name. Pacino also told PEOPLE that he wanted to leave a record for his loved ones, including his four children, Julie, 34 (with acting coach Jan Tarrant), 23-year-old twins Anton and Olivia (with actress ) and Roman, 16 months (with ).
He added: “At least according to me, I’ve had quite a big life.”
Here are the biggest bombshells from Pacino’s memoir, , available now wherever books are sold.
His mother attempted suicide when he was a boy
According to Pacino, one of the most difficult early memories from his childhood growing up in a tenement apartment in New York City’s South Bronx, where he lived with his mom and grandparents, came when he was just six years old. Although he writes that he didn’t understand what exactly happened at the time and that it was “period of time that is kind of a blank to me,” he does recall the morning it happened.
Pacino recalled that his mom was crying and kissing him as she laced up his shoes and dressed him in a sweater so he could play outside with some children in the neighborhood. After heading outside to play, he suddenly saw people running towards his apartment.
“Someone said to me, ‘I think it’s your mother.’ I didn’t believe it. I thought, How could they say a thing like that? My mother? That’s not true.”
“This was not explained to me; I had to piece together what had happened for myself,” he wrote elsewhere, “Years later, I made the film Dog Day Afternoon, and one of its final images, showing John Cazale’s character getting brought away on a stretcher, already dead, would make me think of the moment I saw my mother brought out to that ambulance and taken away.”
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to.
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Pacino ‘always knew’ he’d be a star
Even as a young man, Pacino had faith in himself — and in a “Higher Power” — that he could make it as an actor, as his friend and late mentor British actor Charlie Laughton once told him.
“When I was about 19 or 20,” the Godfather actor recalled, “Charlie and I had finished one of our wanderings full of walking and talking and we came back to my Bronx apartment. As I looked in my mailbox, he was going up the stairs. He stopped on the stairway, looked back at me, paused, and then said, ‘Al, you’re going to be a big star.'”
“I said to him, “’ know, Charl. I know,’ and I meant it,” he continued. “Now I’m not religious or anything. But I feel there’s a spirit. You don’t even have to call it God. In A.A. they call it the Higher Power. Whatever it is, whatever you think it may be, that was mine. I believed it would happen, although it wasn’t something I was preoccupied with at the time or really thought about at all. I just sort of assumed that was what was going to happen, and I accepted it.”
“Whatever this acting thing was, I could do that,” he added.
He remembers an iconic lunch with Marlon Brando — who ate chicken cacciatore with his bare hands
Looking back on one of his many celebrity encounters of the course of his career, Pacino writes about the time he spent with — and how the renowned actor made an impression on him as he was covered in food.
Pacino recalled how The Godfather director told him he should have dinner with his co-star Brando so that they figure out how to play a family on screen. According to Pacino, the thought of sitting down with “the greatest living actor of our time” “f—— scared” him.
“I had my lunch with Marlon in a modest room in the hospital where we were filming on Fourteenth Street,” he wrote. “He was sitting on one hospital bed, I was sitting on the other … And he was eating chicken cacciatore with his hands. His hands were full of red sauce. So was his face. And that’s all I could think about the whole time.”
“He disposed of it somehow without getting up. He looked at me in a quizzical way, as if to ask, what are you thinking about? I was wondering, What is he going to do with his hands? Should I get him a napkin? Before I could, he spread both his hands across the white hospital bed and smeared the sheets with red sauce, without even thinking about it and he kept on talking. And I thought, Is that how movie stars act?”
According to Pacino, Brando was still kind to him as a young actor, despite the messy eating.
“When our lunch was over, Marlon looked at me with those gentle eyes of his and said, ‘Yeah, kid, you’re gonna be all right,'” he wrote.
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He turned down a role in ‘Star Wars’
Although Pacino has spoken about it candidly before, he opened up about his decision to in the 1977 film Star Wars: A New Hope, which famously went to .
“After The Godfather, they would have let me play anything. They offered me the role of Han Solo in Star Wars. So, there I am, reading Star Wars,” he wrote.
“I gave it to Charlie,” he continued, referring to Laughton. “I said, ‘Charlie, I can’t make anything out of this.’ He calls me back. ‘Neither can I.’ So I didn’t do it.”
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Pacino once made a major faux-pas when meeting Jackie Kennedy
The Scent of a Woman actor recalled how early in his career, a young and her daughter attended his Broadway production of Shakespeare’s Richard III and he had the chance to meet them — but one thing still makes him cringe years later.
As he was “slumped” in a chair in his dressing room after a tiring performance, Pacino remembered how he suddenly put his hand out for Kennedy to kiss.
“God only knows what I was thinking. Why would I ever do that? Please tell me, what’s wrong with me?” he wrote. “I must have believed I was dreaming that Jackie Onassis was there. Perhaps I was hallucinating that she was doing the play with me, so she was my queen— and as the queen, after all, she must now kiss the hand of the king.”
He struggled with his sobriety as his star rose
The star writes candidly about his struggles with alcoholism and drug abuse in Sonny Boy, revealing that he felt fame was “isolating me and affecting me deeply” as a younger actor — and he didn’t feel he had any good ways to cope with the intensity that came with it.
“And the way I dealt with it was I took drugs and drank. I wasn’t living the high life. My manner of coping was more low-key and private,” Pacino wrote.
“I thought I was fine. I didn’t drink when I worked — that was my big thing. Work was always first. It was what gave me identity and solace, made me feel I was closer to who I am,” he added. “But God, drinking was a way of life for me.”
He often competed with his ‘very dear friend’ Robert De Niro for roles
It’s well-known in Hollywood that Pacino and fellow actor have been close friends for decades, but he writes in Sonny Boy that the pair were often forced to view each other as competitors, as they went out to audition for the same roles, time and time again.
“While there are things we have in common, we are as different from each other as any two people can be,” Pacino wrote of himself and De Niro, 81. “And there was competition between us. There had to be. Especially when the offers coming in were similar; roles that would go to either one of us, and that either of us could have played. There, and only there, is the stain of competition.”
Despite their occasional rivalry, Pacino noted that the pair remained bonded forever over their love of acting and film.
“Bob and I connected through film — it was film that ignited him, that gave him a medium and a means of expression, and we both related to the art in film,” he wrote.
He became ‘fast friends’ with Elizabeth Taylor
Pacino recounts in his memoir that he and the “great movie star” met while they were both doing theater on the east coast, and became “fast friends.”
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“We would hang out, just enjoying each other’s company,” he wrote of the Cleopatra star. “She was a great actress with a gentle heart … We would talk about everything. I would always ask her about Richard Burton, who she’d been married to twice, and who was my favorite actor along with Marlon; sometimes she’d indulge me and sometimes she’d brush me off.”
“She was a regular person and a walking, talking treasure,” Pacino wrote.
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