For many, it's likely Al Pacino's career is defined by two towering characterizations: the college boy turned mafia boss Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy -- described as "arguably cinema's greatest portrayal of the hardening of a heart" -- and Tony Montana, the bombastic Miami drug lord of Scarface, who went out in a blaze of guns and a mountain of cocaine.
But Pacino -- a stage actor who spent his 20s cutting his teeth in the theater world before catapulting to film stardom -- has embodied a spectrum of characters across his career, defining and re-defining modern masculinity on screen.
In addition to playing the bisexual Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon (a radical career choice for a male movie star at the top of his game in the mid-1970s), his filmography contains a number of films that feature gay characters or, at the very least, queer subtext. Not to mention: his first stage kiss in the role that won him a Tony Award was with another man!
Also notable is the way Pacino's characters react to accusations of homosexuality (and there are several). From Tony Montana to Frank Serpico to Bobby Deerfield, when a character's sexuality is questioned, they deflect with humor, or otherwise seem utterly unfazed -- never defensive or insulted. From an acting standpoint, that seems to be a conscious choice on Pacino's part.
When asked in 2014 why he's chosen to star in so many films with LGBTQ+ themes, Pacino responded, "I don't know, it's the world we live in, it's life[...] it's the world I've lived through. It's a very accepted thing throughout my life, so it's a natural thing."