Which Actors Have Been Friends From Childhood?

There were once two little boys who grew up in the ‘mean streets’ of New York, born one year and a few blocks apart. They weren’t from the poorest families but they were far from rich. One of the boys was fully Italian, the other had an Italian father, and an Irish mother. Growing up, they saw ‘wiseguys’ and made men and gangsters in the street. They saw the gangs, even had friends who joined them... their early childhood was Goodfellas.

One of the friends was the son of an actress-turned-seamstress. The other the son of a painter who had left his wife because he was homosexual — his mother had been an artist. Not surprisingly, both kids inherited the ‘artistic gene’ from their parents, and, from their fathers’ humble immigrant origins, a strong drive to make it in the world.

The two boys grew into men and went their separate ways. They met again in their twenties. The half-Irish one, the tallest and handsomest of the two, had gone to acting school and was now an actor known as Robert De Niro. His friend, a creative fellow but too short for leading man status, was Martin Scorsese. Scorsese wanted to recreate the world they had grown up in, make it come to life for a young audience largely unfamiliar with it. Mean Streets. Taxi Driver. Raging Bull. The King of Comedy. And my own all-time favorite, Goodfellas. These men have truly enriched cinema, and indeed the world, through their art.

Scorsese directed movies. De Niro acted in them. As it turned out, Scorsese was a damned fine director, and script writer. De Niro was a damn fine actor. They would come to define cinema in many ways, and put their mark on the genre of mafia films and organised crime drama like no one else before them, and no one else after.

The two men grew older. Their fortunes increased and their careers took off in ways they never could have imagined when they were young. Now De Niro is 77 and Scorsese is 78. They are fathers, grandfathers. Still thick as thieves, still the best of friends, and still working together from time to time, both on-screen and behind the scenes. Easily one of Hollywood’s most iconic friendships and one that produced some of the best movies of all time. Truly they are living legends.

When it comes to friends who made it big in Hollywood, before Affleck and Damon, there was Scorsese and De Niro. Seventy years since they first met and fifty years since they began to work together professionally, they are still the best of friends and they still produce amazing movies together.