Al Pacino reveals why he doesn’t like showing up at the Oscars

By Charlotte McLaughlin, PA Senior Entertainment Reporter

Oscar-winner Al Pacino has revealed he was “scared” to attend the Academy Awards on some occasions when he was nominated.

The US actor, 84, won an Oscar for playing a blind veteran in Scent Of A Woman, and has had another eight nominations for his acting.

Pacino told BBC Radio 2’s Dermot O’Leary show: “Jack Kerouac, the great writer, beat generation writer who lived in the city, couldn’t cope with it, and somebody said of him that he was embarrassed by success.

“Fame embarrassed him. So I think I might have had a little of that in me, or something.

“So I didn’t show up to a couple of the Oscars and I get a reputation, because they thought – somebody said and my representation said – ‘Oh, Pacino’s not going because he’s not the leading actor, he’s a supporting actor for the Oscar’. Can you imagine me saying, ‘I don’t want to go because I should be up there with (Marlon) Brando’?

“It’s just not in my nature, it’s nowhere near it. And I knew that I didn’t want to go because it scared me, frankly. I was working in Boston in the theatre and I was afraid.”

Brando won a best actor Oscar for his role as Vito Corleone in The Godfather in 1972, the same year that Pacino received his first nomination for supporting actor in the same movie.

Pacino added that he experienced “feeling out of place” a few times, “because I was very famous and didn’t even know it”.

He added: “I started experiencing it before I was even nominated for an Oscar.

“And I remember, I actually won the award, some great award, and I was in Boston doing a play, and I was staying over the director’s house, he gave me a room at his house, and I remember waking up and he said, ‘You won the National Board of Review Award for acting in the Godfather’, and I remember saying to him at the time, ‘Wow, sure, that’s cool’.

“I said, ‘Do you know a psychiatrist I can see?’ Right out of my mouth, because that’s the state I was in.”

Pacino has recently released a memoir, Sonny Boy: A Memoir, about growing up in New York City before studying acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio and rising to fame as Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia trilogy The Godfather.

His most recent Academy Award nod was in 2020 for his role as union boss Jimmy Hoffa in The Irishman.

Pacino also won two Emmys for Angels In America and You Don’t Know Jack as well as being nominated for 19 Golden Globe awards, taking home four.