- Robert De Niro won an Oscar for his role in The Godfather Part II
- De Niro was unsuccessful with his audition for the first film
- The two-time Oscar winner auditioned for the role of Sonny
Robert De Niro has paid tribute to Francis Ford Coppola for passing on him for The Godfather.
While De Niro would win his first Oscar for his performance as a young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II two years later, he was unsuccessful in auditioning for the original film.
A young De Niro read for the role of Sonny Corleone. The part would, famously, go to James Caan. However, things could have been very different.
De Niro’s audition, as seen above, certainly impressed Coppola, but not enough to book him the gig in what many people consider to be the greatest movie ever made.
De Niro Grateful for Coppola’s Rejection
Last night, however, at a ceremony held at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, De Niro paid tribute to the great director, who was being honoured with an American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award.
“Francis, thank you for not casting me in The Godfather,” said De Niro during Saturday’s gala in LA. “It was the best job I ever, never got. And it meant I was available for The Godfather Part II. Francis, you changed my career, you changed my life. We’re all here tonight because of you. We love you.”
(WATCH) Al Pacino and Robert De Niro muse on Francis Ford Coppola and ‘The Godfather’ during the director’s AFI Lifetime Achievement Award presentation pic.twitter.com/wrB6GJk4ta
— Deadline (@DEADLINE) April 27, 2025
The two-time Oscar winner took to the stage with the trilogy’s leading man, Al Pacino, who played Michael Corleone in all three films. Quoting Coppola, Pacino began his own tribute by saying, “The things you do when you’re young that you get fired for, are the same things that years later, they give you lifetime achievement awards for.”
As the audience laughed, Pacino continued his part of the tribute, saying, per Deadline, “You know, none of us were fired from The Godfather, but some of us got pretty close. I got the closest. And Francis just fought for us all the time. He fought for his film and his vision, which he always does. Yet, it could have gotten him fired.
“Everything was a firing threat. It could have had all of us fired, but it didn’t. Now, years later, here we all are to celebrate him for it. So, thank you Francis. Thank for believing in me even more than I believed in myself. I am eternally grateful in kind to be part of your Godfather family.”
Released in 1972, The Godfather was an enormous success, briefly becoming the highest grossing film ever made for a time. The iconic mafia epic, depicting the transformation of a young Michael Corleone from a legitimate, military serving citizen to a ruthless organised crime figurehead, was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, winning three, including Best Picture and Best Actor (Marlon Brando, who rejected the award and refused to attend the ceremony as a boycott over the depiction of American Indians in Hollywood).
Coppola, who also directed such iconic pieces of cinema such as The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Outsiders and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, most recently directed (and self financed) the long awaited and critically and commercially disastrous Megalopolis. Despite the scathing reviews and commercial failings of the film, Coppola was able to see the funny side of it flopping. The director has also drawn favourable comments from those within the industry for never compromising his artistic visions.
