Robert De Niro

One line in the Berlin archive of 2007 is built oddly. The Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution is awarded to The Good Shepherd, but where a name should be the record carries a description instead, for the ensemble cast. Robert De Niro directed that film, one of only two he has directed among our titles, and that is all the entry supports. The Italian academy had put him up for its foreign acting prize in 1980, with Raging Bull. The strangest appearance is on a Korean Film Council page about another actor entirely, which does not describe him at all but uses him: every country, it says, has its own De Niro, meaning a method actor everybody agrees to admire. There he is a unit of measurement rather than a person.