Robert De Niro is an American actor, director, producer, and voice actor. His first major film roles were in Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) and Mean Streets (1973). In 1974, after not receiving the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather, he was cast as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, a role for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

He was born in Greenwich Village, New York City, the son of Virginia Holton Admiral, a painter and poet, and Robert De Niro, Sr., an abstract expressionist painter and sculptor. His father was of half Italian and half Irish descent, and his mother was of English, Irish, German, French, and Dutch ancestry. His Italian great-grandparents, Giovanni De Niro and Angelina Mercurio, emigrated from Ferrazzano, in the province of Campobasso, Molise; and his paternal grandmother, Helen O'Reilly, was the granddaughter of Edward O'Reilly, an immigrant from Ireland.

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