The license is another piece of the collection that illuminates his dedication to character and the lengths he goes to fully inhabit another life. This was just after he had won an Academy Award for “The Godfather Part II,” and one passenger recognized him and commented that things must be especially tough for actors if an Oscar winner was trying to earn money driving a cab. To prepare for his 1976 role as Travis Bickle, a haunted, lonely Vietnam veteran turned New York cabby, De Niro spent a little over a week actually driving a taxi. “It was kind of an arsenal.” License From ‘Taxi Driver’ ![]() “He had been keeping wardrobe items that he would use for auditions, like hats and glasses, for a long time,” Wilson said. “I just liked it.” When it came time to audition for Johnny Boy, he said, he felt that it fit the character. “I wore that hat as a kid,” De Niro told me when I asked where it came from. In Vincent Canby’s 1973 review of the film for The Times, he wrote, “The look, language and performances are so accurate, so unselfconscious, so directly evocative.” De Niro’s performance (opposite Harvey Keitel, above left, and David Proval) and that now iconic hat helped create the visceral realism that still manages to feel in-your-face and raw, almost five decades later. When the actor wore this brown fedora to read for the role of Johnny Boy, the neighborhood punk, Scorsese knew De Niro was his guy, he told New York magazine a few years later. The hat, and the role, marked the start of one of cinema’s most enduring and powerful collaborations, between De Niro and the director Martin Scorsese. “His strength comes from what he doesn’t say.” “I don’t know, if you’re spelunking around in there, if you’re going to be able to find the secret of his power and what he does,” Streep said in her speech. Leonard Maltin served as the master of ceremonies, and Meryl Streep hopped over to Texas to honor her longtime friend and colleague with a speech. He was in town last month for the show, and for a gala celebrating the Ransom Center’s 65th anniversary. “I wanted to keep it for my kids and I wanted to keep it all together,” De Niro told me just after he viewed an exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin showcasing part of his archives. He did not want his “Taxi Driver” script notes to wind up deteriorating in a stranger’s closet in Des Moines, so he sought out a place where the archivists and staff would care for and preserve each piece, including the red boxing gloves and leopard-print robe he wore as Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull” and the pages of letters he and his “Last Tycoon” director Elia Kazan wrote each other. This was around 2006, and De Niro had been looking for a place to donate the extensive collection of props, costumes, scripts, letters and mementos he had accumulated throughout his six-decade career. ![]() How could such an important cultural artifact, created by an acting icon, a true artist, be as easy to bid on as an old pinball machine, or a Las Vegas coffee mug? ![]() AUSTIN, Texas - When Robert De Niro heard that Marlon Brando’s personal, annotated “Godfather” script was for sale on eBay, he was not too happy.
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