Martin Scorsese

Birthday

November 17, 1942 (82 years)

Place of Birth

Queens, New York City, New York, USA

Known For

Directing

Biography

Martin Charles Scorsese (born November 17, 1942) is an American filmmaker. He emerged as one of the significant figures of the New Hollywood era. He has received many accolades, including an Academy Award, four BAFTA Awards, three Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, and three Golden Globe Awards. He was honoured with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1997, the Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute in 1998, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2007, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2010, and the BAFTA Fellowship in 2012. Four of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". Scorsese received a Master of Arts degree from New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development 1968. His directorial debut, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967), was accepted into the Chicago Film Festival. In the 1970s and 1980s, Scorsese's films, much influenced by his Italian-American background and upbringing in New York City, centre on macho-posturing men and explore crime, machismo, nihilism and Catholic concepts of guilt and redemption. His trademark styles include extensive use of slow motion and freeze frames, graphic depictions of extreme violence and liberal use of profanity. Mean Streets (1973) was a blueprint for his filmmaking styles. Scorsese won the Palme d'Or at Cannes with his psychological drama Taxi Driver (1976), which starred Robert De Niro as a disturbed Vietnam Veteran. De Niro became associated with Scorsese through eight more films, including New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1982), Goodfellas (1990), Casino(1995) and The Irishman (2019). In the following decades, he garnered box office success with a series of collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio, including Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006), Shutter Island (2010), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). He worked with De Niro and DiCaprio on Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Scorsese's other films include After Hours (1985), The Color of Money (1986), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), The Age of Innocence (1993), Kundun (1997), Hugo (2011), and Silence (2016). In addition to film, Scorsese has directed episodes for television, including the HBO series Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014) and Vinyl (2016), as well as the HBO documentary Public Speaking (2010) and the Netflix docu-series Pretend It's a City (2021). He is also known for several rock music documentaries, including The Last Waltz (1978), No Direction Home (2005), Shine a Light (2008), and George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011). He has also directed a music video for Michael Jackson's song "Bad". He has explored cinema in the documentaries A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), Il Mio Viaggio in Italia (My Voyage to Italy) (1999), and Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (2024). An advocate for film preservation and restoration, he founded three nonprofit organizations: The Film Foundation in 1990, the World Cinema Foundation in 2007 and the African Film Heritage Project in 2017. Description above from the Wikipedia article Martin Scorsese, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.