The title of Al Pacino’s memoir comes from the nickname given to him by his mother when he was growing up. His parents divorced when he was two, after which he and his mother moved in with his grandparents in the South Bronx, where violence and drugs were rife. One day, six-year-old Pacino was playing outside with his friends when he saw an ambulance pull up outside his grandparents’ tenement. He ran towards the building “and there, coming out of the front doors, carried on a stretcher, was my mother. She had attempted suicide.”
Pacino, now 85, is our gravel-voiced narrator and his performance here is wonderful: warm, fitfully jovial and more intimate than you might expect from an actor who has spent much of his life keeping the public at arm’s length. As well as detailing early traumas – Pacino’s mother died when he was 22 from an accidental overdose – Sonny Boy covers the actor’s burgeoning love of cinema (his mother used to sneak him into movie theatres when he was little) and his time as a struggling theatre actor working menial jobs before finding fame with The Godfather.
Though the book is short on details about his recent life, it digs satisfyingly deep into his acting career. While appearing in a stage version of Strindberg’s Creditors, Pacino suddenly had an epiphany: “Words are coming out, and they’re the words of Strindberg, but I’m saying them as though they’re mine. The world is mine, and my feelings are mine, and they’re going beyond the South Bronx. I left the familiar. I became part of something larger.”
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