SPRING 2012, AND, AS FOR DECADES, THE ATTENTION OF THE world’s film lovers is focused on the onetime fishing village of Cannes, France, and its annual film festival, one of the most prestigious and celebrated cultural events of the year.

On a muggy Friday evening, the air outside the famed Palais des Festivals is plangent with the hum of music written nearly thirty years prior for a movie about hunger, yearning, innocence, violence, crime, betrayal, and memory.

Once Upon a Time in America was an epic both in its creation (a dozen years of writing, eleven months of shooting) and in the vision of its director, Sergio Leone, whose preferred cut ran almost four and a half hours. The film premiered, slightly shorter than that, at Cannes in 1984 to a rapturous reception—a fifteen-minute standing ovation, one observer recalled. But its post-festival fate was a legendary catastrophe. Distributors hacked it almost in half and restructured the narrative, virtually ensuring negative reviews, tepid box office, and a kind of professional oblivion for Leone, who died five years later without directing another film. Over time, though, the movie grew in reputation—in part because of the posthumous stature of its director, in part because increasingly faithful versions of the original cut were released—and it came to be considered by some of its champions as the acme of its genre, the American gangster movie.

And so on this May evening twenty-eight years after its debut, a restored Once Upon a Time in America, twenty-five minutes longer than the version that first premiered at Cannes, will be shown in the very same theater where the original screened—as good an occasion as any for a typically deluxe Cannes gala.

In the dying daylight, with Ennio Morricone’s luxurious and ghostly score on the PA system, the movie’s star, Robert De Niro, climbs the legendary red carpet of the Palais to present the film.

De Niro has ample reason to feel nostalgic. Eight times previously he has visited Cannes in support of a film in which he appeared; twice his work garnered the festival’s top prize, and just the previous year he served as president of the festival’s jury. It has been, in many ways, a lifelong haunt.

And haunting too, surely, would be the absence of Leone, the reunions with his co-stars, some of whom he hadn’t seen since they’d made the film together, and, of course, the spectacle of his younger self on-screen.

But De Niro has experienced all of that many times before, and he has accrued a reputation for stoicism and inscrutability, as well as a detached, even disinterested air about such proceedings.

Something pricks at him on this evening, though, unloosing feelings of the sort he usually reveals only within the strict confines of a movie role or in the hidden chambers of his private life. As he mounts the stairs, he has tears in his eyes, and photos will circulate of him standing in a tuxedo beside his wife with his face clenched in an effort to control his emotions.

Maybe it’s the music, Gheorghe Zamfir’s pan flute soaring sweetly and sadly over a mournful bed of strings.

Maybe it’s the weather: stuffy, wet, thick.

Or maybe it’s the knowledge that the chance to make a film like Once Upon a Time in America is exceedingly rare and impossible to duplicate once it is gone, the knowledge that movies, like life, can pass us by.

Such a sentiment would certainly mesh with the rueful themes and star-crossed history of Leone’s film.

And it would serve, too, as an apt starting point for any discussion of the life and work of Robert De Niro.

WHEN HE BEGAN shooting Once Upon a Time in America, Robert De Niro was, almost without question, the most powerful and compelling actor in world cinema. This is an enormous claim, considering that such titans of screen acting as Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Jon Voight, Robert Duvall, and Gérard Depardieu were still ascendant at the time, and such older masters as Jack Lemmon, Paul Newman, Max von Sydow, Peter O’Toole, Michael Caine, Marcello Mastroianni, and even Laurence Olivier and (when he could be bothered) Marlon Brando were still in the game.

But the Robert De Niro of 1982 stood apart even amid such auspicious and accomplished company.

In the spring of 1981, he had won his second Oscar in six years for his role in Raging Bull, a performance that was immediately recognized as one of the greatest ever captured on film, built of astonishing physical transformations and raw, wrenching emotions. The previous decade had seen him rise quickly from career in shaggy independent films to the center of such landmark movies as Mean Streets, The Godfather: Part II (his first Oscar-winning role, in which he spoke almost entirely in a Sicilian dialect that he learned for the film), Taxi Driver, 1900, and The Deer Hunter. He worked with the cream of Hollywood’s cohort of young Turk directors—Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Cimino, and especially Martin Scorsese, with whom he made five films in ten years—as well as with Bernardo Bertolucci and Elia Kazan. His pair of Academy Awards had been accompanied by two additional Oscar nominations, four BAFTA nominations, and a combined seven prizes from the top critics groups across the nation.

He was a master chameleon and an astonishing risk taker, diving as deeply into his roles as any Method actor ever had and coming through them stronger, bolder, better. He had a supernatural, mysterious air and conveyed danger, poetry, sex, loneliness, daring, intensity, surprise, and thrills. He was as exciting a screen actor as had been seen since the heydays of Brando and James Dean. His name on a movie marquee was a galvanizing draw. And at age thirty-eight, he was just getting started.

But thirty years later it could be hard sometimes to see De Niro’s early glories through what had become the muddle of his later career.

The shift was gradual. For more than a decade after Once Upon a Time he continued to appear in high-quality projects with notable collaborators: Brazil, The Mission, Angel Heart, The Untouchables, Midnight Run, We’re No Angels, Mad Dog and Glory, Heat, Wag the Dog, Jackie Brown, Ronin. He made three more movies with Martin Scorsese—Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino—and made his directorial debut with the tender and substantial A Bronx Tale. Over time, he gravitated toward smaller roles, working in ensembles or in cameos rather than carrying whole films, but he continued to be recognized by his peers, receiving Oscar nominations for Awakenings and Cape Fear. And he continued to be one of American cinema’s most watched, imitated, and respected actors.

He didn’t, however, have a real blockbuster hit until 1999, when the outright comedy Analyze This became the first film of his career to gross more than $100 million (by comparison, Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Travolta—and, more to the point, Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson—had each reaped that sum at least five times by then). It was a clever movie, making comic hay of De Niro’s tough-guy aura and giving him the chance to demonstrate a funny bone that he’d shown as far back as the 1960s but had long suppressed under his serious Method-actor veneer. The following year, De Niro appeared in Meet the Parents, a comedy that was neither as clever as Analyze This nor as carefully built around his on-screen persona; naturally, it was an even bigger box office hit. And it presented De Niro anew—for audiences and moviemakers—in a way that would muddy his public image and threaten the impact of his legacy.

Two Parents sequels would follow, culminating in a trilogy that took in more than $1.2 billion at the box office globally and accounted for three of the four highest-grossing films De Niro ever made. And they were, relatively, the highlights of his career in the 2000s and 2010s. In that era, he shared billing with the likes of Eddie Murphy, Edward Burns, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Dakota Fanning, as well as James Franco and Bradley Cooper before either of the latter two proved a solid talent. He appeared in action movies that the distributors hid from the critical press until opening day (one such, Righteous Kill, co-starred Al Pacino), and he worked with directors of finite gifts and dubious reputation.

He’d had misfires in the 1970s and ’80s—New York, New York, Falling in Love, Stanley and Iris—but it had always been clear that they’d been made with superior collaborators and with an idea, perhaps unrealized, of quality at their heart. But the films he made after the first Parents and Analyze films were of another breed: make-work, work-for-hire, paycheck jobs, call them what you will. He was capable of moments of inspiration, but by and large, the De Niro of the twenty-first century erased much of the goodwill—and, indeed, awe—accrued by the younger De Niro. “How does he do it?” was the most common question asked about his gifts early in his career: later it would be replaced with “What happened?”

In 2012 there was a brief upswing—a grounded and unflattering performance as a self-styled literary genius (and sometime taxi driver) hobbled by mental illness in Being Flynn and, miracle of miracles, a wrenching and savvy turn as a neurotic gambler trying to connect with his troubled adult son in Silver Linings Playbook, which earned him his first Oscar nomination in twenty-one years. But he quickly followed those up with the sort of wheel-spinning and money-grabbing stuff that had marked his work of the previous decade. If the old De Niro had reemerged, he hadn’t, seemingly, decided to stick around.

AND YET IN other ways, the qualities of application, focus, and doggedness that marked the work of his younger days were still salient as De Niro turned seventy. While his choice of acting roles in the 2000s and ’10s may have seemed dubious, his working life away from the movie set had expanded in scope and had come to define him in dimensions having nothing to do with acting. He regularly produced films and TV shows and even theatrical works; some of them, such as We Will Rock You, a stage celebration of the music of Queen, turned out to be enormously profitable. He continued to pursue directing, spending years to make the quietly tense and credible 2006 spy saga The Good Shepherd. He amassed a real estate and restaurant empire, starting in New York and spreading around the world, by 2014 elevating his net worth to an estimated $310 million. And he raised second and third sets of kids following up on the pair of children he’d sired and adopted in the 1970s.

Most visible, and perhaps most significant, was his investment since the early 1990s in the economic and cultural renaissance of lower Manhattan, his birthplace and the site of so much of his most memorable screen work. He was one of the first high-profile residents of the community known as Tribeca (for “Triangle below Canal”) and came to be a significant investor in the infrastructure of the neighborhood, which once was filled with small industries and warehouses but, after De Niro committed himself to its development, became an enclave of pricey apartments, chic restaurants, trendy boutiques and night spots, and cultural and tourist activity. He built a film center in the neighborhood, a block of offices suited to production companies and their ancillaries; he opened restaurants; and he provided Tribeca with a draw and an identity, even if the community was not always entirely willing. After the devastation of the 9/11 attacks on the nearby World Trade Center, De Niro and his associates created the Tribeca Film Festival, an event specifically geared toward celebrating independent film in a way that would bring vitality and attention to the neighborhood. He was a bona fide New York icon, both on and off the screen.

And icon is an entirely fitting term for a man of such secret depths. From virtually the first time reporters came to him to ask questions, De Niro scurried away like a wild animal. Though toward those who asked, he was respectful and apologetic through his clumsiness, he was determined to share, reveal, or explain next to nothing about his private life or his working methods. At first it was a seemingly playful thing—the new Brando acting much like the old one with the press. And when he did talk, the content was generally so bland and nonspecific that there was almost a comic air to it. In time, though, his reticence was discussed in darker tones as a pathology, a form of control, even a lack of professionalism, and by the 1980s, his stardom cemented, it became a theme in discussions of the man and his work. Whole articles were written in major magazines about the very subject of De Niro’s reluctance to be interviewed, about journalists’ courtships of and rejections by the star, and about the lengths to which shopkeepers and restaurateurs in Tribeca were willing to go to help their neighbor protect his privacy. Whenever he finally did emerge—to discuss a new business venture or a charitable venture—he lacked the ease and depth that marked the talk of, say, his famously garrulous chum Martin Scorsese. And when in 2012 he dove into the rigors of his first modern Oscar campaign, there was an air of unreality about the whole thing: when had Robert De Niro become the sort of movie star who would appear on daytime TV and choke back tears while discussing his family life?

Or was it just who he was—a man of unusual emotional capacity who had learned almost from childhood to be self-contained, guarded, and chary, even as he made tremendous strides in the most public of all occupations, acting? In many regards, De Niro’s early life and the strong identities of his parents marked him in ways that he never escaped and maybe never even tried to.

His father, also named Robert De Niro, was a highly respected but somewhat neglected painter of the post–World War II New York School; his mother, born Virginia Admiral and known by that name after the brief two-year marriage that produced her only child, was an independent businesswoman in the midst of bohemian Greenwich Village, active in progressive arts and political scenes but savvy, wary, and tough with a dollar.

From his father, with whom he never lived after about 1945 but with whom he was always close, De Niro learned the virtues of dogged work, self-criticism, and creative integrity; the elder De Niro’s career was at its brightest in the 1950s, and as his commercial luster faded he held ferociously to his artistic vision and ideals, sometimes taking menial work to keep a meager roof over his head, but always maintaining a strong sense of purpose in pursuit of his aesthetic standards. From his mother, who possessed a firm ethic of Yankee thrift and caution and who built a one-woman typing service into a full printing business and, years before her son, a small real estate empire in lower Manhattan, De Niro learned financial acumen and strong senses of loyalty and territoriality. Both parents were creatures of powerful will: the senior De Niro was brutally hard on his own work, abandoning version after version of paintings until they met his criteria of worthiness, and Admiral was, in her son’s formative years, a tireless worker and networker, connected to theatrical, literary, and artistic lights and sufficiently intent on carving her own way in life that she never remarried.

Together not even long enough to see their son out of diapers, De Niro’s parents maintained separate households (such as households were in their circles), and the boy not infrequently bounced between the two, often on his own, a silent observer of grown-up life with his nose in books, bereft of siblings and cousins and, often, playmates. It can’t be any sort of surprise that a child raised among adults—and adults who were swimming determinedly against the current of mainstream postwar American ideas of normalcy—should turn out to be guarded, suspicious, leery.

And yet, for all his vaunted privacy and secrecy, De Niro would spend most of his adult life in the most public of professions, pursuing it at first with his parents’ sense of zeal and toil, then with a ferocious thirst for work that outweighed even that of his coevals and peers Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Jack Nicholson. Only four of the years after 1968 failed to see a new film featuring De Niro, often in the lead, and often, especially in those first decades, revealing startling depths, abilities, and personality. In his performances—and in the frequently arduous effort he put into creating his performances—he opened himself up in ways that he was almost never willing to when in the presence of a journalist with a microphone. He never, as he once suggested he might, wrote a memoir, but his work—and the work that went into his work—stands as his autobiography.

AND WHO WAS he, this inscrutable, talented, and elusive man? What did he bring to the screen, and what did audiences take from him?

Start with the looks. He was always handsome, with the aspect of a slightly more rugged Alain Delon. But with just a little tweak of lighting he could be either appealing or ugly.

There was that mole, perched on the corner of his right cheekbone like an asterisk, a mark of jauntiness or irony, or even, when he was roused to anger, the sight on the end of a rifle barrel: unblinking, accusatory, immutable. When his face was lean, as it was generally, the mole was accentuated and defined, almost like a third eye; when he was heavy, it could seem like a scrap left on his cheek after a messy meal. It was so clearly visible that it almost threatened his handsomeness, which bordered on prettiness when he was young and developed into ruggedness as he aged. But he carried it so unconsciously that you felt as guilty noting it as if you were staring at someone’s lazy eye.

A lot of actresses sported such moles—beauty marks—almost as if defying the audience to see them as faults: Marilyn Monroe, Marion Cotillard, Angelina Jolie, Madonna. And, too, there might have been a time, perhaps when he was a young actor, when De Niro was tempted to have the thing removed. (Actors have done far more to themselves in their struggles toward careers.) Fortunately, he never succumbed to such a vain impulse, and the mole became as much a part of his persona as his smile, in which his whole face seems to pucker in delight (he can grin and grimace at once, show delight and menace at the same time, offer a smile that’s a threat or a scowl that embraces), or his enviable, ever-changing hair, always thick and pliant and wavy even as it turned gray, often long enough to make him look like a rocker, sometimes cut short for the sake of accuracy or even to shock.

His body, too, was a malleable thing, at times chiseled and fit, at times soft and homey, now and then genuinely rotund. Lots of actors changed their looks for parts with makeup, hairpieces, prosthetics; De Niro, more than once, changed his entire shape, his commitment to his roles so thoroughgoing as to make his journey beneath the skin immediately apparent, like a tattoo, upon the skin.

And that’s just what could be seen of his actorly craft. His work, from his earliest days as a student actor to very near the present, was actually far deeper, more technical, and more immersive than was generally acknowledged or understood. For the first forty years of his acting career, De Niro dove into almost every role he took with fervent research on the page and, when possible, in person: brutally paring away at dialogue (his preference was always for showing rather than telling), having long colloquies with screenwriters, directors, and fellow actors, and being meticulous in the preparation of props and costumes.

From his earliest days, he was prone to keeping lists of questions to ask, items to acquire, skills to master—always with an eye toward presenting a character as realistically as possible. He learned to speak Neapolitan and Sicilian dialects, drive a cab, play the saxophone, box, customize a military uniform like an Army Ranger in Vietnam, toss a catcher’s mask aside like a major league ballplayer, and speak like a native of the American South, Northeast, and Northwest.

He could drive directors and acting colleagues crazy with his obsessive focus on detail, but he learned to build a character from the outside in, to allow the inner life of the men he played to emerge through a firmly established air of external realism. Even very late in his career, when critics and audiences often accused him of taking any part for a paycheck or phoning in his performances, you could see him building real men out of specifically chosen items of clothing, props, habits, turns of speech, and mannerisms. In a very real sense he saw acting as work and playing a character as a moral act, and he would almost always make an effort to live up to his own professional and ethical standards and do right by the men he portrayed.

That discipline of building from the outside in made him an actor with whom directors had to exhibit patience. Very rarely was he fully ready to play a scene at its best in the first or second take. He had to steep himself in the emotion of the story, feel the energy of his fellow actors, mine himself for psychological and physical nuances. When he and his colleagues had sufficient bonds of trust to allow him to explore, he could create remarkable moments—real and convincing and seemingly unrehearsed. In the first decades of his movie career, working in lead roles on large films with powerful directors and the luxury of time, he was able to produce one remarkable performance after another in just this fashion. Later, when the scripts weren’t as precise and the directors not so patient or capable, his performances could come to feel generic; you get the very strong sense that he was given fewer chances to play each scene in, say, Meet the Parents than he was in Taxi Driver. But by then, like so many actors with scores of memorable films behind them, he could rely on an audience’s accrued trust and memory and affection to add the depth that maybe he himself couldn’t bring to a character. Lots of actors, for instance, could have played the neurotic mobster in Analyze This; De Niro, arguably, was the only leading man in Hollywood who could bring decades of resonant performances as a hard man to the film’s seriocomic psychodrama.

HE HAS LONG been a figure of great contradiction in the movie business, reticent with the press but willing to go on late-night talk shows and do sketch comedy—and particularly agreeable about taking part in things that made fun of his own legend and persona. He would mock himself on Saturday Night Live and on TV commercials, but he was unwilling to share even with an innocent anecdote in conversation with, say, David Letterman or Jay Leno; sometimes he would speak in monosyllables or—defiantly, comically—not at all. You might wonder why he bothered, and then you realized that his show of taciturn stubbornness was in some ways more real and true and memorable than any palaver he might’ve offered up. It couldn’t have pleased the movie studios whose pictures he was supposed to be publicizing, but it stuck with you, and when he finally did at least appear to be opening up, such as in the Oscar campaign for 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook, he was all the more impressive for finally revealing himself.

And if he never truly opened up as a private man, there would still be so much of him to savor: Johnny Boy Civello riffing on various neighborhood characters in Mean Streets; Vito Corleone blending the ways of the Old World and the New in The Godfather, Part II; Travis Bickle ticking like a human time bomb in Taxi Driver; Michael Vronsky surviving hell and burying it within himself in The Deer Hunter; Jake LaMotta visiting righteous punishment on boxing foes, family members, and chiefly himself in Raging Bull; Rupert Pupkin wheedling his way into showbiz, legally or otherwise, in The King of Comedy; the gangsters and killers and bad guys of The Untouchables, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino, Heat, and Analyze This; the complex but decent heroes of Bang the Drum Slowly, Midnight Run, Awakenings, A Bronx Tale, Wag the Dog, Ronin, Being Flynn, and Silver Linings Playbook.

Though movie actors may never say a single thing about themselves, may never once willingly open the door to the truth of their hearts and minds, nevertheless—if they are good enough and last long enough—they eventually spill everything about themselves out into the world.

De Niro may have tried assiduously to keep from revealing who he is, providing only hints and allusions in response to personal questions. Yet, every time he appears before us, no matter the costume, the voice, the name, the story, there he is, stark and plain before the world: a working man, a man of principle, a man of ideals—in short, a man in full, as clearly defined by the work he has done as by the life he has lived.