De Niro: A Biography

For many film fans, Robert DeNiro is still a maverick actor associated with such distinctive films as The Godfather Part II, Mean Streets,1900 and Taxi Driver. Yet as this biography points out, DeNiro has been almost as cavalier with his gifts in recent years as Marlon Brando. There is a surprising amount of new information in this book, especially on DeNiro's relationship with his painter father and the burdens of running his TriBeCa film complex in New York, given the actor's opaque public utterances and avoidance of the press. I am not sure anyone can really work out what motivates DeNiro, but Baxter comes close and does it with his usual elegance and wit.