![]() ![]() Then again, in a film where Donald Sutherland headbutts a cat to death, you have to do something fairly spectacular to get noticed. The former middleweight champion died Tuesday at a Miami-area hospital from complications of pneumonia, according to his longtime fiancee, Denise Baker. in order to play the life of boxer Jake LaMotta: from the writing phase, to De Niros. Jake LaMotta, an iron-fisted battler who brawled his way to a middleweight title and was later memorialized by Robert De Niro in the film Raging Bull, has died. ![]() (One compensation: he gets to wear some terrific suits.) Nowhere is De Niro’s willingness to commit to the part more evident than in the explicit, religion-revealing scene where he and Depardieu are given simultaneous hand relief (a “ski pole”, if you will) by a prostitute (Stefania Casini) who is then plied with drink by De Niro whereupon she has an epileptic fit. De Niros performance confounds the simple categorizations of film. Naturally, he visited Italy to learn the language and dialect, but he also accepted the somewhat thankless role of Alfredo, born on the same day as the peasant Olmo ( Gérard Depardieu) but forever in his shadow – a cowardly, privileged, none-too-subtle representation of the landowning bourgeoise. The huge weight gain De Niro underwent to play Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull is regularly and rightly cited as indicative of his intense commitment to the craft, but De Niro’s fearless, if in this case, perhaps slightly misguided, pursuit of excellence is equally evident in Bernardo Bertolucci’s five-and-a-half-hour epic 1900. The film, distributed by United Artists, stars Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta, an Italian-American middleweight boxer whose self-destructive and obsessive rage, jealousy and animalistic appetite destroyed his relationship with his wife and family. De Niro got his first big break courtesy of Brian De Palma, who cast him in his 1968 film Greetings as Jon Rubin, one of three draft-dodging friends, although his major scene in that.
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