Penguin Random House to publish Al Pacino’s new memoir, Sonny Boy, in October

Penguin Random House will publish Al Pacino’s new memoir, Sonny Boy, on 8th October 2024. 

Century will publish in the UK, with publishing director Ben Brusey striking the deal for UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Mollie Glick at CAA. 

Sonny Boy is billed as “an astonishingly revelatory account of a creative life in full”. The publisher said: “To the wider world, Al Pacino exploded onto the scene like a supernova. He landed his first leading role, in ‘The Panic in Needle Park’, in 1971, and by 1975, he had starred in four movies – ’The Godfather’ and ‘The Godfather Part II’, ‘Serpico’, and ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ – that were not just successes but landmarks in the history of film. Those performances became legendary and changed his life forever. Not since Marlon Brando and James Dean in the late 1950s had an actor landed in the culture with such force.” 

It continued: “But Pacino was in his mid-30s by then and had already lived several lives. A fixture of avant-garde theatre in New York, he had led a bohemian existence, working odd jobs to support his craft. He was raised by a fiercely loving but mentally unwell mother and her parents after his father left them when he was young, but in a real sense he was raised by the streets of the South Bronx, and by the troop of buccaneering young friends he ran with, whose spirits never left him. After a teacher recognised his acting promise and pushed him toward New York’s fabled High School of Performing Arts, the die was cast. In good times and bad, in poverty and in wealth and in poverty again, through pain and joy, acting was his lifeline, its community his tribe.”