AL PACINO

Visual biographies of cinema's greatest stars

American cinema, as we've known it since The Godfather, would be impossible to reimagine without Al Pacino. As Michael Corleone he breathes life into an American of epic dimension. His characters may explode (Tony Montana in Scarface), or be paragons of calm and cunning (the journalist in The Insider), but his extraordinary eyes do the real talking. As a rival says of Tony Montana, "There is no lying in him," and this is equally true of Pacino. Good or evil, he is at all times a man to be trusted, impossible to ignore, a magnet for our continuing attention.

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150 high quality enigmatic and sumptuous portraits, colorful posters and lobby cards, rare film stills, and previously unpublished candid photos showing the stars as they really are.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.