Most moviegoers associate actor Robert De Niro with adjectives like "intense," "violent," "streetwise," and "brooding." It is an image that De Niro has carefully nurtured over the last fifty years of his career. He used gesture, voice, and, most importantly, his mesmerizing eyes to convey to the audience the disturbing emotions with which he imbued his characters, from his earliest films like Mean Streets through classic portraits of violent, disaffected men like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Jake La Motta in Raging Bull up to and including comic tour de forces like the maniacal father in Meet the Parents. De Niro’s journey from alienated teen through conflicted stardom and finally to committed activist again replicates the trajectory of many of his characters, who also travel from the depths of despair to some form of redemption, no matter how unconventional. For in De Niro’s world, art and reality are often indistinguishable.

The Movie Icon series: People talk about Hollywood glamour, about studios that had more stars than there are in heaven, about actors who weren't actors but were icons. Other people talk about these things, TASCHEN shows you. Movie Icons is a series of photo books that feature the most famous personalities in the history of cinema. These 192-page books are visual biographies of the stars. For each title, series editor Paul Duncan has painstaking selected approximately 150 high quality enigmatic and sumptuous portraits, colorful posters and lobby cards, rare film stills, and previously unpublished candid photos showing the stars as they really are. These images are accompanied by concise introductory essays by leading film writers; each book also includes a chronology, a filmography, and a bibliography, and is peppered with apposite quotes from the movies and from life.