10 Essential Robert De Niro Performances

Taxi Driver provided Robert De Niro his most iconic role and, in a film of staggering perfection, his Travis Bickle became one of cinema's most enduring characters. Bickle is a Blakean creation, a character forged in the shadow of religious guilt, one looking for mastery of his conflicted mind - Allen Ginsberg’s assertion that he “can’t stand his own mind” could have been written for Travis. 

Betsy (a hallucinatory Cybill Shepard) tells him he's a walking contradiction and she’s right: Bickle is a remote entity, not so much walking the line between sin and salvation as vaulting it, jumping from one side to the other, flirting with each before taking the latter to a porno theatre and thus committing to the former.

Bickle is “God’s Lonely Man,” and De Niro plays him as an avenger, a nightmarish angel seemingly sent to deliver us from evil. In a tour de force performance, the stand out remains the “You talkin’ to me?” scene, improvised by De Niro in a hellish address to himself, the ‘scum’ of the picture, and to the audience, who are left fully aware of De Niro’s astonishing powers as a performer. Much imitated, never bettered, this is truly one of the greatest performances of all time. Taxi Driver remains the quintessential Scorsese/De-Niro collaboration, and, simply put, it's one of the best films ever made.