Scorsese, Martin (1942– )

US director, screenwriter, and producer. One of the most influential figures in modern US cinema, he has made such contemporary classics as Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), GoodFellas (1990), and The Age of Innocence (1993). He won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Director for his crime drama The Departed (2006). Many of his most successful films have featured the actor Robert De Niro.

Many of Scorsese's films are immensely personal narratives, informed by his Italian-American Catholic background. They deal with the motifs of sin and redemption, alienation, masculine violence, and obsession, and display complex characterization, an elaborate visual style, and innovative use of popular music. Among his other films are Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), New York, New York (1977), The King of Comedy (1982), After Hours (1985), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Cape Fear (1991), Casino (1995), Bringing Out the Dead (1999), and Gangs of New York (2002).

From the late 1980s onwards, Scorsese became involved in the work of other film-makers. He produced The Grifters (1990) and Clockers (1995), among several others, and also performed in Round Midnight (1986), Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1989), Guilty by Suspicion (1991), Quiz Show (1994), and Search and Destroy (1995).

He received the American Film Institute's life achievement Award in 1997. In 1998 he was the recipient of the Billy Wilder Award for Excellence in Film Direction presented by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures Awards.

Scorsese was raised in New York City's ‘Little Italy’ and studied film at New York University. There he won acclaim for his shorts What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (1963), It's Not Just You, Murray! (1964), and the surreal The Big Shave (1967). Like many film-makers in his generation, he received an education in low-budget genre production under Roger Corman, for whom he directed Boxcar Bertha (1972). With Mean Streets, however, he returned to the more personal style of film-making he had first displayed in Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1969) and which he would later develop in Taxi Driver and, above all, Raging Bull. Mean Streets in particular proved to be hugely influential on the generation of US film-makers who emerged in the 1990s, such as Nick Gomez and Quentin Tarantino. Pursuing his interest in the strong cultural influences of popular music, he directed the documentaries No Direction Home (2005), about Bob Dylan, and Shine a Light (2008), about The Rolling Stones.

Scorsese has also been instrumental in campaigning for film preservation and enhancing the public's knowledge of their film heritage, both through re-releasing old films on celluloid, video, and laser disk, and filming the wide-ranging documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (1995).