Al Pacino has opened up about his complicated relationship with fame that left him seeking therapy.
Speaking to Dermot O’Leary on his BBC Radio 2 show, the Oscar-winning actor, 84, said: “Jack Kerouac, the great writer, best generation writer who lived in the city, couldn't cope with it and somebody said of him that he was embarrassed by success. Fame embarrassed him. So, I think I might have had a little of that in me, or something.
“So I didn't show up to a couple of the Oscars and I get a reputation - because they thought, somebody said and my representation said, ‘Oh Pacino’s not going because he’s not the leading actor, he's a supporting actor for the Oscar….’ Can you imagine me saying, ‘I don't want to go because I should be up there with Brando’? [laughs] It's just not in my nature, it's nowhere near it. And I knew that I didn't want to go because it scared me, frankly. I was working in Boston in the theatre and I was afraid.”
Elaborating further, he continued: “Because feeling out of place is a strange feeling. I mean not being able to function because you don't know the language, in a way, it's a precarious place to be in. And I experienced it a few times because I was very famous and didn't even know it. And then I started experiencing it before I was even nominated for an Oscar. And I remember, I actually won the award, some great award, and I was in Boston doing a play, and I was staying over the director’s house, he gave me a room at his house, and I remember waking up and he said, ‘You won the National Board of Review Award for acting in the Godfather’, and I remember saying to him at the time, ‘wow sure that's cool’. I said, ‘Do you know a psychiatrist I can see?’ Right out of my mouth, because that's the state I was in!”
The Scent of a Woman star has been forced to revisit a number of difficult parts of his life recently as he is promoting his memoire Sonny Boy, which was released on October 15.
This includes an extremely painful-sounding childhood injury that thinking about still makes him feel “squeamish”.
Explaining that when he was younger he “seemed to cheat death on a regular basis,” he likened himself to “a cat with many more than nine lives”, adding: “I had more mishaps and accidents than I can count.”
He then went on to detail an incident that occurred when he was around 10, saying: “I was walking on a thin, iron fence, doing my tightrope dance. It had been raining all morning, and sure enough, I slipped and fell, and the iron bar hit me directly between my legs.”
He continued: “I lay there on the bed, with my pants completely down around my ankles as the three women in my life - my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother - poked and prodded at my penis in a semi-panic.
While they waited for a doctor to make a house visit, he says he had only one thought in his mind.
He shared: “I thought, God, please take me now, as I heard them whispering things to one another as they conducted their inspection.”
You can listen to the interview in full on Dermot O’Leary’s show this Saturday on BBC Radio 2 (8am-10am) here.
