{"id":685487,"date":"2026-07-11T05:03:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T05:03:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/685487\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T05:03:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T05:03:17","slug":"al-pacino-names-the-greatest-movie-star-in-hollywood-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/685487\/","title":{"rendered":"Al Pacino names the greatest movie star in Hollywood history"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Al<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still<\/p>\n

Fri 10 July 2026 17:45, UK <\/p>\n

Actors and movie stars are often two separate and distinct breeds, but when Al Pacino<\/a> first broke through in the 1970s, those lines became more blurred than ever before.<\/p>\n

Today, the distinction feels easier to make. Ryan Reynolds is a movie star, but Daniel Day-Lewis is an actor. Joaquin Phoenix is an actor, but Tom Cruise is a movie star, although you do have the A-listers who have one foot in each world, with Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, and Leonardo DiCaprio at the top of the list.<\/p>\n

In the \u2018Golden Age\u2019, everybody knew who the stars were, but \u2018New Hollywood\u2019 upended the status quo<\/a>. For arguably the first time ever, the biggest names in the industry were also its best actors, and many of them didn\u2019t look like the conventional ideal of a matinee idol, either.<\/p>\n

Alongside Pacino, there was Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, and Dustin Hoffman, to name a few, not that the movie star was dying out, as Burt Reynolds would attest at his peak. Actors deliver the performances, whereas stars put the arses in the seats, but that generation could do both.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no recipe for securing cinematic superstardom, and Pacino himself has always seemed bemused that he became one of the faces of \u2018New Hollywood\u2019, not that he should have been<\/a>, when five Academy Award nominations in seven years and a string of seminal films couldn\u2019t have made it any clearer.<\/p>\n

As for what it takes, though, he\u2019s not so sure, although he\u2019s got a handle on who he thought did it best. \u201cThat\u2019s a hard one to figure,\u201d he pondered, musing on what it takes to be a movie star. \u201cIt\u2019s innate or something. I think it comes with the territory. Let\u2019s put it this way; I just don\u2019t know how Cary Grant did it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Movie stars don\u2019t come more iconic than Grant<\/a>, who was never considered one of his era\u2019s most talented thespians from a purely performative standpoint, but for decades, there weren\u2019t many who shared his orbit as one of the most recognisable, famous, and in-demand faces in all of Tinseltown.<\/p>\n

Further reading: Cutting Room Floor<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I look at him, I think, \u2018Wow,’\u201d Pacino continued. \u201cHe had a few attributes, like looks and stuff like that, but at the same time, he also had this delivery, this charisma, the person he became, this persona. Now, that belonged to a certain age, a certain era. Movie stars are different today.\u201d<\/p>\n

With that in mind, turning to the modern era, he named DiCaprio \u201cas another kind of movie star\u201d and George Clooney as being \u201ccloser to the ones that I\u2019m familiar with,\u201d something the actor and filmmaker has become used to hearing, having been constantly compared to a \u2018Golden Age\u2019 throwback. Still, none of them hold a candle to Cary.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still Fri 10 July 2026 17:45, UK Actors and movie stars are often…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":685488,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[2754,28267,20577,156152,6491,96,123,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-685487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-actor","tag-actors","tag-al-pacino","tag-cary-grant","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-hollywood","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685487\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/685488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}