Penguin Press Announces Al Pacino Memoir
On October 8, Penguin Press, a publishing house of Penguin Random House U.S., will publish “Sonny Boy”, the memoirs of famous Hollywood star Al Pacino, in the U.S.. According to the publisher, the book is an account of Pacino’s path to acting, his great roles, as well as the most important relationships in the famous actor’s life.
When film buffs hear the name Al Pacino, scenes from his most famous role as Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful mafia trilogy “The Godfather” may immediately come to mind. Or perhaps as the gangster Tony Montana in “Scarface”, the blind retired lieutenant colonel Frank Slade in “Scent of a Woman” or Lt. Vincent Hanna in “Heat.” The list of remarkable roles that Al Pacino, one of the most outstanding character actors in U.S. cinema, has played over the course of his long film career is long. In his memoirs “Sonny Boy,” which Penguin Press will publish in the U.S. on October 8, the actor tells us how he personally experienced all this.
When Al Pacino celebrated his first successes as a film actor in his mid-thirties, he had already lived several lives. A fixture of avant-garde theater in New York, he had led a bohemian existence, working odd jobs to support his craft. He was raised by a fiercely loving but mentally unwell mother and her parents after his father left them when he was young, but in a real sense he was raised by the streets of the South Bronx, and by the troop of buccaneering young friends he ran with. After a teacher recognized his acting promise and pushed him toward New York’s fabled High School of Performing Arts, the die was cast. In good times and bad, in poverty and in wealth and in poverty again, through pain and joy, acting was his lifeline, its community his tribe.
The publisher describes “Sonny Boy” as “the memoir of a man who has nothing left to fear and nothing left to hide. All the great roles, the essential collaborations, and the important relationships are given their full due, as is the vexed marriage between creativity and commerce at the highest levels.” Pacino himself says: “I wrote Sonny Boy to express what I’ve seen and been through in my life. It has been an incredibly personal and revealing experience to reflect on this journey and what acting has allowed me to do and the worlds it has opened up. My whole life has been a moonshot, and I’ve been a pretty lucky guy so far.”
