In 1965, in a film by Marcel Carné, one of the greatest current Hollywood actors took his first steps in the cinema as an extra. Did you recognize him?
Sacred monster with a spectacular career, Robert de Niro has in turn lent his features to characters who have marked the history of cinema, and there are countless monuments that today make up his large filmography.
From Goodfellas to Raging Bull, via Mission, Heat, The Godfather or The Incorruptibles, this actor with an unforgettable face and unparalleled charisma is one of the most famous in Hollywood (even if he has also sometimes accepted a few roles totally improbable).
However, 58 years ago, almost a decade before he began his fruitful collaboration with Martin Scorsese (in Mean Streats, then in Taxi Driver), Robert de Niro was still a complete unknown in the eyes of the general public, and a simple extra who was trying to find a place on the Hollywood scene.
As we can see in the excerpt below, his very first role as an extra in the cinema dates back to the year 1965 (he had previously played in the student film by Brian de Palma). He was then just in his twenties, and with his father, was visiting France. It was there that he applied to play – for a single day of filming – the customer of a New York restaurant, in Marcel Carné’s new film, Three Rooms in Manhattan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwJWpvgcHX8
This romantic drama carried by Maurice Ronet and Annie Girardot, who can be seen having lunch alone in the scene in question, therefore allowed De Niro to take his very first steps in dark rooms. By observing carefully, we can indeed see him seated in the background, in the company of a young woman, right between the two French actors.
Looking even more closely, we can also see that between two shots of the scene, he has surreptitiously changed places and that the very first scene of Robert de Niro in the cinema therefore contains… a nice false connection.
Three years later, shortly before knowing the beginning of the glory, the future protagonist of Taxi Driver has also again played the extras for Marcel Carné, in the drama entitled Les Jeunes Loups.
(Re)discover the trailer for “Three bedrooms in Manhattan”…