An asthmatic boy barred from sports grew into Scorsese, cinema's great chronicler
Asthma kept young Martin Scorsese off the streets of Little Italy, so his family took him to the movies instead. The boy who once wanted to be a priest became a defining New Hollywood director, obsessed with guilt, redemption and violence, and one of film preservation's fiercest champions.
Scorsese was born in Flushing, Queens, on November 17, 1942, and raised in Manhattan's Little Italy. His parents, Charles and Catherine, both worked in the Garment District, he as a presser and she as a seamstress, and both also acted. All four grandparents came from Sicily. The family name was originally Scozzese, Italian for Scottish, until a clerk's transcription error changed it.
Unable to play with other children, he absorbed films instead. Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes left a deep mark, and as a teenager he travelled to the Bronx to rent the only copy of The Tales of Hoffmann in a shop where one other regular borrower was George A. Romero. John Ford's westerns and Italian neorealism, especially Rossellini's Rome, Open City, shaped how he saw his Sicilian heritage. He tried a preparatory seminary but failed after a year, and turned to New York University, earning an English degree in 1964 and a master's in 1968.
His debut, Who's That Knocking at My Door, reached the Chicago Film Festival in 1967. Mean Streets in 1973 introduced his signatures: slow motion and freeze frames, voice-over, raw violence, heavy profanity and Robert De Niro. The two went on to make nine more films together, including Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, while a later run of six pictures with Leonardo DiCaprio brought commercial hits. The Departed finally won him the Oscar for best director, and Killers of the Flower Moon in 2023 united both actors.
Beyond features he has directed television for HBO, rock documentaries such as The Last Waltz, and personal histories of American and Italian film. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, one of three nonprofits he set up to rescue and restore old movies. Honours include the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1997 and the Kennedy Center Honor in 2007.
Source: Martin Scorsese
