Martin Scorsese

Widely regarded as one of the most influential directors working today, Martin Scorsese is the mind behind The Last Waltz, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, the last two of which are frequently cited as some of the greatest movies ever made. His passion for film began when he was just eight years old, and in 1968, he completed his first full-length feature, Who’s That Knocking At My Door? Of course, it wasn’t until the release of his gritty 1976 neo-noir Taxi Driver that Scorsese earned worldwide recognition.

Born November 17th, 1942, in Flushing, New York, Martin Charles Scorsese was raised by Italian-American parents in Manhattan’s Little Italy, a district he once said felt more like a village in Sicily than a den of urbanity. His parents were both part-time actors, which is just as well because, as an asthmatic, Scorsese couldn’t take part in the same childhood activities as most children. In fact, he spent most of his youth at the local movie theatre, where he fell in love with the films of the Italian neo-realists. By the time he was eight, he was already drawing storyboards. His parents were a little confused by their son’s obsession, but these doubts were resolved when one of his ten-minute comedy shorts won him a scholarship to New York University.

After graduating from NYU in 1966, Scorsese took on a job as a film instructor at the university, where he taught the likes of Jonathan Kaplan and Oliver Stone. From 1968 onwards, he made movie after movie. But it was in the 1970s that his star really began to rise. Films and documentaries like Taxi Driver and The Last Waltz made him a legend in his own lunchtime. He continued making films throughout the ’80s and ’90s, earning box-office hits with films like Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ, and hit a second wind in the 2000s and 2010s with Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street and Silence. Today, the director shows no sign of slowing down.