47 pages • 1 hour read
Al PacinoSonny Boy: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Overcoming Loss and Hardship
In his memoir Pacino shares personal details about his upbringing and the difficulties he’s endured throughout his life. He shows how he was able to overcome serious losses and hardship with the support of his friends and his passion for acting.
While Pacino’s childhood unfolded in poverty, he didn’t feel that this was a burden at the time thanks to his close friendships with several other neighborhood boys. However, in hindsight, he recognizes that his family and neighborhood were poorer than most, which he believes aggravated his mother’s mental health issues. He also writes about how his childhood friends became involved in crime and substance misuse, leading to their early deaths. When Pacino’s mother and grandfather died early in his adulthood, he was left without an emotional anchor or safety net. Pacino had to provide for himself, and struggled to make ends meet.
Pacino remembers how his friends tried to help him during these tough years. When he had no place to stay he relied on his friends: “I was moving from one place to another, usually ending up on a friend’s couch or floor” (80). His friend Martin Sheen also gave him an understudy job when he saw how much he was struggling. Pacino often credits the support of his friends with helping him overcome difficulties later in his life as well, such as when he thanks Diane Keaton for helping him resolve his midlife financial crisis and getting him a comeback film role. In highlighting the role his friends have played in his life, Pacino emphasizes how much the support of others has meant to him both personally and professionally.
Pacino also writes about how his love for acting helped him work through his grief over his mother and grandfather’s deaths. He focused his efforts on acting lessons, auditions, and his theater performances. While Pacino’s anecdotes reveal his struggles, they also show how his own continued determination helped him heal from his grief and create a new life for himself as an actor. He remembers, “I knew I was going to get there […] I had to make it, because that was the only way I would survive this world” (61). Pacino also credits his love for the arts with helping keep him out of the lives of crime and fatal substance misuse that caused his childhood friends’ early deaths. In depicting acting as both a career and as something that helped give purpose to his life, Pacino presents acting as a vocation instead of just a professional role.
In hindsight, Pacino recognizes the unlikeliness of his rags-to-riches story, and agrees with his friend Charlie Laughton that, “My whole life was a moon shot” (362). Pacino’s memoir thus tends to cast hardships and loss as things that, while difficult, are possible to overcome.
Performance as an Art and a Career
Sonny Boy depicts the performing arts from the actor’s perspective, showing the highs of creative fulfillment, storytelling, and success, as well as the lows of fame, criticism and rejection. Pacino reveals that his greatest artistic satisfaction came from the theater, while his most profitable roles were Hollywood screen roles. These two different acting mediums allow him to explore performance both as an art and as a career.
Pacino was intrigued by the theater at a young age. As a 15-year-old he saw the Chekhov play The Seagull and was “riveted” by the actors’ performances. He shares, “I felt its power—the sense of being transported into a world that I was not familiar with and seeing myself in the lives of these fictional people” (39). As a student and young actor, Pacino remained passionate about theater. As a working actor, he made little money, but felt that being part of the New York theater scene made him a part of something greater than himself. While it was his theater career that earned him the attention of Hollywood, ironically, Pacino always preferred theater acting to film. While he grew to feel invested in his film performances, he always really felt like a “theater person” (107).
The pressure of his Hollywood fame and the criticism that accompanies the movie business even prompted Pacino to quit films for a while. He remembers, “I felt trapped, creatively drained, distant from any connection to why I became an actor in the first place” (235). It was the theater that helped Pacino recover from his creative exhaustion and brought back his sense of joy. He admits he considered making movies again for the money, but he was “too happy” (247). Pacino’s revelation that he returned to Hollywood out of financial necessity shows how he considers Hollywood a place to make money rather than a haven of artistic expression.
Even when Pacino was sorely in need of money and accepted uninteresting film roles just to pay the bills, he could not resist returning to his first love, the stage. He enthuses about performing as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, writing, “The ol’ fire in the belly was back. Night after night, I’d show up, go on that stage, and say: tonight, I will play this role, and I will play it without knowing what I will do next” (312). Pacino’s effusive reflections on his stage work depict the theater as his true passion, and film as a more pragmatic career choice.
The Search for Identity
Throughout Sonny Boy, Pacino reveals how his upbringing and his passion for the performing arts have shaped his identity over the last eight decades. He also recounts his struggles to reconcile his identity as an actor with his personal life.
Growing up in the South Bronx, Pacino’s identity as a child was profoundly influenced by his neighborhood and friendships. As a mischievous and adventurous child living in a more dangerous neighborhood, Pacino and his friends delighted in mocking and pranking people in charge, like police officers and boy scout meetings. The author admits, “Making mischief and running away from authority figures was our pastime” (18). Pacino’s early identity was thus strongly tied to his neighborhood, with his own sense of self mirroring what he saw in the boys around him.
As Pacino grew older, however, he began to realize the limitations of identifying so strongly as a rebel. When his friend Cliffy became more wild and criminal, Pacino thought more seriously about his own behavior. He found himself drawn to reading and to the theater, while his old friends were still more invested in causing mischief. Pacino’s experience of acting in a school play gave him a significant boost, as it briefly reunited his mother and father for one happy evening. He remembers, “Acting in this play had brought my mother and father back together again, had made me part of something again. I actually was whole. I felt that sensation for the first time in my life” (34). He chased this feeling by studying performance in high school and the Herbert Berghof Studio, and over time his identity began to shift away from neighborhood tribalism and his peer group as he refocused on this new passion.
Pacino admits, however, that acting sometimes subsumed other parts of his identity. He writes at length about how his strong commitment to acting sometimes sabotaged his personal life and mental health, with Pacino developing an alcohol dependency under the pressures of fame and feeling unable to nurture his romantic relationships properly. While Pacino never regards acting as something he needs to give up entirely, he does recount periods in his life when he had to step away from fame to recenter himself and to work on his personal issues. These instances enable Pacino to explore some of the downsides of having one’s identity too deeply absorbed in one’s work.
Now in his 80s, Pacino ends his memoir by celebrating his career and reaffirming how important his acting career is to his sense of self. He credits his energy and ongoing interest in life to the thrill acting still gives him, making it clear that being an actor remains a core part of who he is.
