Versatile and veracious

Visual biographies of cinema's greatest stars

American cinema, as we've known it since The Godfather, would be impossible to reimagine without Al Pacino. As Michael Corleone he breathes life into an American of epic dimension. His characters may explode (Tony Montana in Scarface), or be paragons of calm and cunning (the journalist in The Insider), but his extraordinary eyes do the real talking. As a rival says of Tony Montana, "There is no lying in him," and this is equally true of Pacino. Good or evil, he is at all times a man to be trusted, impossible to ignore, a magnet for our continuing attention.