The Quiet Chameleon

"Yeah, well... I think that... umm ... you know ... uh-hah." Actor Robert DeNiro is not voluble. Nor, offscreen, is he particularly visible. Lean, with lanky brown hair and narrow, green-brown eyes, a pallid face by turns near-handsome and homely, he has the protective coloration of a chameleon.

But turn a camera or raise a curtain on him and the reticent, barely descript DeNiro undergoes a metamorphosis. In Bang the Drum Slowly, he remade himself into a slovenly, Southern-bumpkin, baseball player; in Mean Streets, into a jittery, petty street hoodlum. Now, with his portrayal of the young Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II, DeNiro, 31, has come fully and formidably into his own as a character actor of range and depth.

DeNiro's young Don is a precise, elegant understatement, a portrait of a peasant aristocrat in an ill-fitting suit. His movements are sure, deliberate, catlike, his eyes icy; he is most frightening in a single, beautiful smile that seems the last flicker of human warmth in a young man resolved to become a killer.

Notebook Research. DeNiro is not a Hollywood but a New York actor, a term loosely used to describe a certain style and attitude, with implications of seriousness, stage-oriented technique and lengthy, underpaid apprenticeship. DeNiro has been plugging away at his profession for 14 years, through workshop productions, off-off-Broadway, dinner theaters, touring companies and a number of unsung independent films. Friends describe DeNiro as demonic, obsessive, perfectionist. He researches a role like a counter-intelligence agent cramming for a new identity. In his tiny, crabbed script, he fills one small notebook after another with research. DeNiro says he concocts an entire biography for a character: "Where he is from, where he is going, how he holds his knife and fork." For Bang the Drum, DeNiro, who had never played baseball, spent weeks in south Georgia and in spring-training camps in Florida learning the life of a tobacco-chawing Dixie ballplayer. "The first day I got to Georgia," DeNiro recalls, "I met a guy in a pickup truck and he drove me around. I taped his voice, other voices, even the mayor of the town." As for the tobacco, "you get nauseous at first."

Since his Godfather II role was Sicilian to its mol ten core, he spent six weeks in Sicily mastering not only the regional dialect but a specific local variant. Challenged to play the young immigrant who would become the Godfather already denned by Marlon Brando, De Niro armed himself with a video tape of Brando's performance. "I didn't want to do an imitation, but I want ed to make it believable that I could be him as a young man. I would see some little movements that he would do and try to link them with my performance. It was like a mathematical problem --having a result and figuring out how to make the begin fit."

DeNiro grew up on the streets of Manhattan's Greenwich Village. His parents, both artists, were separated when he was two. At ten, he briefly attended Saturday acting classes at New York's New School but soon turned to "hanging around" in flashy silk suits.

Says his mother: "His idea of high school was just not to show up." After unsuccessfully attending several, at 16 he quit altogether. A year later, he went back to drama classes and stayed.

He explains his decision to be an ac tor with difficulty: "At first, being a star was a big part of it. When I got into it, it became more complicated. To totally submerge into another character and experience life through him, without hav ing to risk the real-life consequences -- well, it's a cheap way to do things you would never dare to do yourself."

DeNiro guards his privacy as obsessively as he burrows into the details of his characters. He still lives in the same $75-a-month, two-room walk-up flat in which he grew up. The apartment is meagerly furnished, but it has two enormous closets stuffed with the props and trappings of a 19th century itinerant actor: hats, coats, canes, umbrellas, thrift-shop shirts and shoes.

Food Lover. Although not precisely a recluse, DeNiro is known for dropping out by dozing off at social events --most recently, under a table in the dining room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Even close friends are accustomed to dinners at which he says little more than hello, thank you and goodbye.

But between the hail and farewell, there is the saving grace of food. He loves to eat, Friend Donald Sutherland notes, "and he goes at it the same way he does acting--with notebooks and everything." Indeed, the silent DeNiro can suddenly wax lyrical on the empyrean pasta glory of cappelletti con prosciutto.

Despite the avalanche of offers since the release of Godfather II, DeNiro remains reserved, cautious, determined to pick his roles with care and thus build up a coherent "body of work." Currently co-starring as the son of a rich Italian landowner in Bernardo Bertolucci's epic, 1900, DeNiro is also gearing up for his next project, the title role in a new film by Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets) called Taxi Driver. He is already the proud possessor of a New York City hack license and plans to spend a month at the real thing--as perhaps New-York's first ungabby cabbie.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.