Regular readers are familiar with the fact that I have a stack of books at home which have been sent for review.

With winter weather and all the associated charms of that, it’s time to shorten that stack of books. The volume on the top of the pile was a new biography of actor Robert De Niro, written by film critic and biographer Shawn Levy, who has previously published a number of actor biographies, including such subjects as Paul Newman, Jerry Lewis and the members of “The Rat Pack.”

Instead of going on to review a stack of four or five books, I thought it would be interesting to review the De Niro biography and then to choose a small selection from the 104 films in which he has appeared. We can squeeze in a small review of four of his films to get a sense of his acting talents and the scope of his acting talents. Those 104, by the way, don’t include the two films he has directed, nor those he has produced, of which there are 32.

Between films which I own, and those which can be borrowed from the James Prendergast Library, I have spent the past week watching this quartet: “Taxi Driver,” from 1976, “Raging Bull,” from 1980, “The Deer Hunter,” from 1978, and “Once Upon a Time in America,” from 1984. I hope you’ll enjoy reading about them as much as I enjoyed researching them.

THE BIOGRAPHY

Writing a biography of Robert De Niro is a huge challenge for any writer. The actor was born in 1943, so he is still very much alive, and anything written might change between the writing and the sale of the book.

Although the actor has always used the same name, there are a number of different spellings which have been attached to him in newspapers, television interviews and even on films in which he has had a major role, which makes researching quite difficult at times. It isn’t that he doesn’t mind, but he has never felt it was important enough to go after misspellings.

Most important of all, De Niro has always hated being interviewed. He has usually refused outright to do any interviews, even when he had a major motion picture depending on him for publicity. He declined to speak with Levy, and didn’t encourage his family and friends to answer questions for his biographer. When he has given interviews, he has often deliberately misled the interviewer.

Levy’s book is huge. It has more than 550 pages and weighs enough to cause a concussion if it were to fall on someone’s head. There were times when I was reading it that I felt he couldn’t possibly know how the actor felt about some incident or why he chose one role over another one.

But those moments were rare. The book is easy to read, uses colorful and interesting language choices, and while he may be taking a broad guess at times, his decisions are both authoritative and sensible.

The actor was born in New York City in the neighborhood which is known as “Tribeca.” That name is an acronym for the term “TRIangle BElow CAnal Street.” His long career and many, many films have nearly always been set in that same neighborhood and have usually taken place during the actor’s life span.

De Niro is the only son of two professional painters: Robert De Niro Sr. and Virginia Admiral. His father was especially celebrated as an artist and his paintings hang in many museums and galleries, including a number in Europe. The parents divorced when their son was still very young, but they hung together as a family unit with Admiral often paying bills and providing living space to her ex-husband, and De Niro Sr. minding their son in his studio while Admiral pursued her successful real estate business, which paid most of the bills until the son began earning fees in the millions for his acting.

While the actor has been cast almost entirely as an Italian character, and often as a member of the Mafia, he is in fact half Irish.

The actor has been married twice and maintained for many years an additional domestic partnership. Some of his six children have derived from each of his three relationships.

Levy maintains his focus firmly upon the actor and leaves no clear picture of the wives and children. There are short sketches, such as a sentence or two about how Diahnne Abbott played the tiny role of the woman at the candy counter of a movie theater with whom De Niro’s character had a quarrel in “Taxi Driver,” or that his present wife, Grace Hightower, has created a foundation which has started a number of industries in African countries where thousands of people can earn a decent living and obtain needed health care.

Levy paints for us a very vivid portrait of his subject. For much of his career, De Niro has been considered one of the finest film actors alive. He has been celebrated for the chameleon-like way he has studied his characters and changed his hair, his body type, his voice, his facial features and seemingly, in every way, has created characters with real lives of their own.

Some years ago, De Niro donated several truckloads of memorabilia to the University of Texas at Austin, including scripts to nearly all of his famous films, costumes and devices he had made to fit inside his nose to change the shape of his nostrils and the like. Spending many weeks among those archives, Levy has created a picture of an actor who completely inhabited the lives of his characters, often at the sacrifice of his own lifestyle.

When appearing in a film called “Bloody Mama” in 1970, De Niro supposedly convinced actress Shelley Winters to put aside her reluctance to give baths to the four nude adult actors, including De Niro, who played her sons.

“You have to think of us as your babies, even though we aren’t babies any more,” he told her.

The list of films he made in which he was wildly successful include “Bang the Drum Slowly,” “Mean Streets” and “The Godfather, Part II.” These were so successful that soon he was entirely responsible for the success or failure of his films. If he would sign a contract, studios would agree to make that particular film. With his name on a cast list, investors would risk millions of dollars in support of his films. His salary was often as much as half of the budget of his films, and if he gave a winning performance, it nearly always meant that the film made a profit.

If the public didn’t like his portrayal, the film could lose millions, and many of the actors in the cast found themselves with no new job offers and had to go into other lines of work.

Levy said that this heavy responsibility weighed on De Niro so much that it caused emotional scars and contributed to breakups of his marriages.

After 1987’s “The Untouchables,” De Niro began to withdraw personally from the roles he played. “Analyze This,” a lightweight comedy made with Billy Crystal, made in 1999, became the most successful film in which he had appeared up to that date. It wildly out-earned much higher-quality films like “The Bronx Tale,” and “Night and the City,” but he began to turn to more light comedies and to leave the soul-felt excavations which made him such an icon.

Three of his five highest-earning films include “Shark Tales,” for which he provided the voice of a sea creature, “Meet the Parents,” in which he played an interfering father who browbeat the young man who wanted to marry his daughter, and its sequel, “Little Fockers.”

Occasionally, he still produces a powerhouse character as he did most recently in “Silver Linings Playbook.” However, the driven artist of his earlier days seems to exist no longer.

Meanwhile, he remains active in making films with other actors and actively raising the value of properties in Tribeca, which lies only a few blocks from the site of the original World Trade Center. He has created a quality theater for the projection of films, which he seeks to give an opportunity to be seen when they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do so.

He has built a number of successful restaurants, including the Tribeca Grille and the Japanese cuisine spot Nobu, which have brought hundreds of successful people to the neighborhood. In turn, drug addicts, pushers, muggers and the like have been driven out.

Levy published the biography in 2014. It’s marked for sale at $32.50 in hard cover edition and is generally on sale around the nation. Find it with ISBN number 978-0-307-71678-1.

TAXI DRIVER

The film “Taxi Driver,” by director Martin Scorsese is an older film, and it shows its age. The ability to make computer-generated elements in the film were not possible in 1976, so the film’s special effects seem wooden to modern audiences.

De Niro plays a character in the film who is literally dying of loneliness. He refers to himself as “God’s Lonely Man.” He is a Vietnam veteran who has returned to a society without any place in which he fits in. His character, Travis Bickle, spends his days driving around New York City – often for 14 hours per day. He willingly drives into the most dangerous sections of the city, and finds himself kind of wishing someone would try to rob him or something so he won’t have to deal with another meaningless day.

It is ironic that a central character in the film is actor Jodie Foster, who plays a 12-year-old prostitute. Travis finds himself determined to save Foster’s character from the pimps and thugs who dominate her life, while trying to woo a wealthy young woman played by Cybill Shepherd.

Travis shaves the sides of his head into a “Mohawk” hairstyle, buys a whole suitcase full of guns and sets out to murder a presidential candidate so that Shepherd’s character will see him as a person, instead of just an interruption in her day.

Who could have foreseen that 11 years after the film was released, a deranged fan named John Hinckley, Jr., who had watched the film multiple times, would try to impress Foster, who by this time had become a student at Yale, by shooting President Ronald Reagan?

It’s a violent film, which examines elements of life which are depressing and which most of us would rather not think about, but so real is De Niro’s portrayal that it’s almost impossible not to come to understand – if certainly not to agree with. The idea that “Taxi Driver” cost $1.3 million to make, and earned a profit of approximately $27 million, while “Little Fockers” cost $100 million to make and earned a profit of $48 million beyond its initial cost, can make one question our society and its values almost as effectively as the serious film itself.

RAGING BULL

The 1980 film “Raging Bull” is ranked by many critics as De Niro’s greatest film, and it involved his greatest transformation of his own body. The film is a biography of real-life boxer Jake La Motta, who was the middleweight champion of the world.

First, De Niro got himself into physical shape so that he could believably portray a world-champion boxer. He also made his eyes appear to be swollen, his nose appear to be broken and other such changes. Finally, he stopped filming for a period of six weeks, and in that interlude gained 60 pounds to portray the over-the-hill fighter when he had outlived his youth and his fame.

“Raging Bull” has a number of strikes against it. First of all, it was filmed in black and white, which seems to displease modern audiences. Director Martin Scorsese once again believed that his fighter lived in a world where everything was either black or white with no middle ground and he felt that the black and white picture built and enhanced that illusion. Scenes in which La Motta remembers happy periods from his childhood were filmed in color.

Secondly, in 1980, audiences were completely unfamiliar with films in which they weren’t supposed to either love or hate the central character. La Motta was a real person. He was course and uneducated. He beat his wife and shoved people around. His success as a fighter came from allowing his opponents to punch and hit him until they were exhausted and then brutally beating them into unconsciousness.

On the other hand, he is the central character and we keep naturally falling into rooting for him and caring about his successes and failures until the next demonstration of his brutality. De Niro’s characterization is riveting.

The cost of the film was $18 million and eventually brought in $45 million at the box office. It’s another demonstration of “God’s Lonely Man,” and it humanizes those of us who watch it.

THE DEER HUNTER

I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. Nearly all my classmates had fathers who trudged off to the steel mills most days of the year, and we spent Friday nights going down to Pittsburgh Road and watching them pour white hot slag from the huge furnaces directly into the stream where it sent up a positive Niagara of steam and leaping water.

“The Deer Hunter,” from 1978, is about a group of buddies in the steel making town of Clairton, Pennsylvania. Interestingly, there is a Clairton southeast of Pittsburgh, near McKeesport, but it isn’t the town portrayed in the film. Ironically, since Pennsylvania wasn’t as generous with tax breaks and other incentives, the film was mostly made in Cleveland and in the cities of Ohio along the Ohio River.

There are three central characters in the film. All are lifelong buddies of Russian descent, who work together in the brutal inferno of the steel mill, and on their occasional day off like to hunt in the nearby mountains. Curiously, the mountains in the film don’t look like anything I’ve seen in Pennsylvania, but more resemble the pointed peaks of the Rockies.

The trio has grown up in the conservative lifestyle of the factory, and all eagerly volunteer to fight in the Vietnam War. Michael, played by De Niro, is the natural leader of the group, although he is deeply smitten by Linda, played by a very young Meryl Streep, although she is engaged to his friend Nick, played by Christopher Walken. So, Michael’s personal code of honor means he must pine without hope for her.

The third buddy, Steven, is played by John Savage. The day before they leave for war, Steven marries Angela, whom he loves deeply, even though she is pregnant with another man’s baby and his mother hates her and constantly reviles and insults the couple.

Director Michael Cimino creates a society in which the three men fit. This is symbolized by the elaborate Russian Orthodox ceremony, in which everyone present has to know what to do and when, even though the ceremony is in Russian, especially in the almost frantic dancing at the reception. This isn’t individual dancing, where each couple follows its own direction, but dancing done by a whole room of people. Should one person turn the wrong way or lose his or her footing, many people would crash into them and fall.

We then see the men in Vietnam, where they see constant killing and brutality. The three are captured by the Viet Cong and tortured in various ways, including being forced to participate in games of Russian Roulette, in which one bullet is placed in an otherwise empty gun, and the victim is forced to pull the trigger with the barrel against his temple.

Mike is eventually able to arrange their escape, but by that time, Steven has lost both of his legs and Nick’s sanity is rocky at best. The unity of the first half of the film is impossible at the end, and everyone’s life, both the soldiers and their loved ones from home, have only the remains of a life to live through.

Streep is said to have accepted the basically passive and insignificant role as the girl left behind because she was in love at the time with actor John Cazale, who played a friend who didn’t enlist with the film’s leads. The public later learned he was dying of bone cancer in real life and didn’t live to see the finished film. Cazale is probably best remembered as the brother who was ordered killed by Michael Corleone because of his disloyalty in “The Godfather.”

“The Deer Hunter” had a budget of $15 million, and earned a gross box office total of approximately $50 million. It was the first film to deal with the realities of the Vietnam conflict, compared to films such as John Wayne’s “The Green Berets,” which was jingoistic and celebratory of war.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA

By far the best of the four films, in my opinion, was “Once Upon a Time in America,” made in 1984 by Italian director Sergio Leone, who is better known for his low-budget western films made in Italy. They were called “Spaghetti Westerns.”

The film is a very serious examination of life for young Jewish boys in New York City ghettos from the 1920s to the 1960s. It shows how they were forced into violent and crime-ridden lives to deal with their parents’ round-the-clock occupations, trying to stay alive with police corruption that made an encounter with a cop more likely to be deadly than one with a mobster and set in the beautifully filmed and even oddly beautiful city in which they live.

The film introduces four young men whose two leaders grow up to be played by De Niro and James Woods. The result is very human and we care profoundly about these people, although none of them are what we would call “admirable.”

There is heroism, betrayal and many surprises as the protagonists fight to survive in a violent and soulless world.

The film cost $30 million to make and took in only $5.3 million at the box office. The number of talented people who lost everything they had is considered a major cause of De Niro’s switch to light comedies.