Al Pacino wants to stay alive for person in his life who is 'so fresh and alive and new'

At 83, Al Pacino became one of ’s oldest fathers last year when his former girlfriend Noor Alfallah gave birth to baby Roman.

The tot is now 16 months old and seems to have given the a new reason to be hopeful for the future - and to want to stay around for as long as possible.

In his new memoir he writes: “I look at this little baby, my son Roman, who has recently come into my life and I say, wow, look at you. It just gives me a chuckle every time I look at him. When he was three or four weeks old, I would think, what does he know about anything? There he is, sitting there. Nobody’s touched him, in the way of influencing him. He’s just there.

“So he’s got everything going for him. He’s like a little Buddha. It takes a while for the face to change. That mask that we all eventually get, where does that come from? Maybe it comes from all the clichés that are thrown at us growing up, the delusions and illusions, the screwing and unscrewing of light bulbs. Be a good boy, be a good girl. And you see that in the infant.

“It’s not just a human being - it is a canvas that’s going to be painted on. It’s so fresh and alive and new. The will paint its face on the specimen we all are.”

In a TV interview to promote the book he added of late fatherhood: “It’s extraordinary. I’ve reacted to it as many ways as you can possibly react to it. It’s wonderful, you know, I have this little person. Everything he does is interesting to me. Now I want to be around for this child. Of course I did, but things happen and I wanted to be and I hope I stay healthy, and he may know who his dad is.”

Pacino also explains in the book he hopes to explain his life to his son when he is older, which started in the South Bronx where he played baseball in amongst rubbish and lived in a tiny apartment. But times have changed and he notes it will feel like “describing Oliver Twist’s London to them”when he mentions the Forties and Fifties now having been born in 1940.

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Al Pacino is a name - and indeed face - recognisable around the world for movies including The Godfather, Scarface and Dog Day Afternoon.

His new book discusses his initial upbringing in New York’s Bronx by his single mum Rose, who struggled with depression and died from an overdose when he was 22.

In an early excerpt of the memoir published in August he had told how his mum was “emotionally fragile” and had previously made a suicide attempt.

They clashed over Pacino’s desire to become an actor and he left home after dropping out of many of his school classes in favour of acting. He subsequently attended the High School of Performing Arts after getting in via an audition.

He struggled to make money and his grandparents helped when they could when he started acting in theatres, before eventually getting a break in Broadway and on the big screen.

His mum never lived to see him truly conquer the stage and screen and this perhaps explains why he emotionally references her when it comes to mortality in his memoir.

Coming to the end of the memoir which is named Sonny Boy because that was his mum’s nickname for him, he writes: “This life is a dream, as Shakespeare says. I think the saddest part about dying is you lose your memories. Memories are like wings: they keep you flying, like a bird on the wind. If I am lucky enough, if I get to heaven perhaps I’ll reunite with my mother there. All I want is the chance to walk up to her, look in her eyes and simply say ‘Hey ma, see what happened to me?’.”

Whilst he quit drinking in 1977, on camera Pacino has often been a wildman filled with energy, wielding drugs, drink and guns or all three at the same time in menacing roles.

Off screen he is more mildly spoken and now has four children; baby Roman as well as twins, son Anton and daughter Olivia, 23, from a seven year relationship with actress Beverly D’Angelo. His eldest daughter Julie Marie, 34, comes from a relationship with acting coach Jan Tarrant.

The book touches upon his struggle with drinking in the Seventies and failed romances which used to sometimes make his boozing worse. He perhaps came closest to settling down with Kathleen Quinlan.

They were together from 1979 for several years, but she wanted to walk down the aisle. He wrote: “My time with Kathleen was the closest I’ve ever come to getting married. But I’ve always shied away from marriage. I guess I didn’t see how it would help anything. I just wanted to avoid what I thought, at the time,

was the inevitable, an entrance to the pain train. I thank God that Kathleen is still my friend to this day and I love her. But it wasn’t easy to say no to marriage with a woman I loved. She knew what she wanted and she got it, only it was with someone else. It hurt when she left and I carried the hurt with me for years.”

Another big turning point was the role of mobster Michael Corleone in The Godfather. Movie bosses were unsure about him and after seeing the first few rushes they wanted to get rid of him. But director Francis Ford Coppola was convinced he was right for the role and even moved up a big scene to ensure they could see his potential. The trick worked but on the same day Pacino fell and hurt himself and was convinced in the moment his dream was over.

He writes: “I had to run out of the restaurant and make my escape by jumping on to a moving car. I had no stand-in I had no stuntman. I had to do it myself. I jumped, and I missed the car. Now I was lying in a gutter on White Plains Road in the Bronx , at on my back and looking up at the sky. I had twisted my ankle so badly that I couldn’t move.

They were trying to lift me up, asking me: Was my ankle broken? Could I walk? I didn’t know. I lay there thinking, This is a miracle. Oh God, you’re saving me. I don’t have to do this picture any more. I was shocked by the feeling of relief that passed over me.”

Pacino went on to earn an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his performance, and he returned for the sequels The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III. These along with other gangster films have made him one of the biggest names in cinema.

Now he works much less and as he looks ahead to hopefully many more happy years with son Roman and the rest of his family, he feels a relief he didn’t die, following a near-death experience in 2020 when he collapsed.

He told the : “I opened my eyes, there were five paramedics in my living room. There were two doctors who looked like space men, and there was an ambulance in front of my house. There was something and then there was nothing, not no fall, not anything. There was just nothing, which was, in retrospect, sort of frightening. I know I’ve been a little different since it happened. So maybe I got a new brain or something. Maybe something happened.”

Reflecting again on his mortality he adds: “Am I gonna not be here all of a sudden? You know you have that. Once you have it, you can relive it. There were no white tunnels, nothing. It’s like Shakespeare says, in To be or not to be....no more. Maybe there is no afterlife for me. No sequel.”

* Sonny Boy by Al Pacino is out now, published by Penguin. Al Pacino: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is on BBC2 at 9pm on October 25.

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