Category: Director
Active: 1963-Present
Honours:
Academy Awards: 2 wins (Best Picture & Best Director for The Departed), 15 nominations
BAFTA Awards: 3 wins (Best Film, Best Direction, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Goodfellas), 14 nominations
Directors Guild of America Awards: 2 wins (Outstanding Directing – Feature Film for The Departed, and Outstanding Directing – Drama Series for Boardwalk Empire), 12 nominations
Golden Globe Awards: 3 wins (Best Director – Motion Picture for Gangs of New York, The Departed, and Hugo), 10 nominations
Grammy Awards: 1 win (Best Music Film for No Direction Home), 3 nominations
Emmy Awards: 3 wins (Outstanding Directing For a Drama Series for Boardwalk Empire, Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special & Outstanding Directing for a Documentary/Nonfiction Program for George Hamilton: Living in the Material World), 11 nominations
Has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (located at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard)
Culturally Significant Productions:
Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), Goodfellas (1990), and The Departed (2006)
Career Summary:
Scorsese is now considered an all-time great in Hollywood, and with good reason. His CV speaks for itself really, but aside from his multitude of awards, his real legacy is the influence he has had on cinema. Most notably in recent years, his fingerprints can be seen all over 2019’s Joker, which owes a lot of its DNA to Scorsese’s King of Comedy.
Not only is his style so recognisable now, but his directing has lead many great actors into their most famous roles, not to mention several awards. He has directed no less than seven Oscar winning performances, including Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, and Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York. His frequent collaborators read like a who’s-who of Hollywood, and he continues to attract the biggest and brightest stars.
In each of the last four decades, Scorsese has released a film which many other directors would envy. The 1970s had Ragin Bull, The 80s Raging Bull, the 90s? Goodfellas. Even in the past two decades, as Scorsese approaches eighty, he still produces incredible work such as 2019’s The Irishman. He hasn’t released a film in this decade yet (he is working on another epic that was postponed by COVID). In the hands of any other director, any of these films would be their masterpiece, for Scorsese, it’s just another day’s work.