Al Pacino Gets Actors' Highest Honor. He Says He 'Wondered and Wandered.'

Al Pacino, the actor behind Michael Corleone, Tony Montana and Frank Slade, will receive SAG-AFTRA's Life Achievement Award, the actors union's highest honor, the union announced Thursday. He is the 62nd recipient.

Pacino will accept the award at the 33rd Actor Awards on Sunday, Feb. 28, 2027, at the Shrine Auditorium & Expo Hall in Los Angeles. The ceremony will stream live on Netflix at 8 p.m. Eastern. The award goes each year to an actor who fosters "the finest ideals of the acting profession," and it honors both career and humanitarian work, Variety reported.

"I wondered and wandered"

Pacino's own statement was short and, for a man known for shouting some of the most famous lines in movie history, quiet. "I wondered and wandered most of my life but have always felt at home with a script and my fellow actors," he said. "It's the work and the actors along the way that have been among the greatest joys of my life. It's an honor to be recognized by SAG-AFTRA in celebrating the journey."

SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin was less restrained. "Like so many actors, I have spent my life in awe and appreciation of the force of nature that is Al Pacino," he said. "When you watch him perform, you are witnessing a student and a master."

Six decades of work

The career is hard to overstate. According to the union, Pacino's first major film role came in "The Panic in Needle Park" in 1971. The next year, Francis Ford Coppola cast him as Michael Corleone in "The Godfather," which earned his first Oscar nomination. He went on to nominations for "Serpico," "The Godfather Part II," "Dog Day Afternoon," "...And Justice for All," "Dick Tracy" and "Glengarry Glen Ross," and won best actor for "Scent of a Woman." In 1993 he became the first male actor nominated for two acting Oscars for two different films in the same year. His ninth nomination came for playing Jimmy Hoffa in "The Irishman" in 2019.

He has also won two Tony Awards, two Primetime Emmys and two Actor Awards, along with the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Golden Globes' Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Kennedy Center Honor, Variety noted. He kept returning to the stage, including Shakespeare. He played Shylock in "The Merchant of Venice" in Central Park and on Broadway in 2010 and earned a Tony nomination for it, and London's Shakespeare's Globe honored him this year, the union said.

The union also cited his charitable work, including the 2001 "America: A Tribute to Heroes" telethon after the September 11 attacks, a 2012 campaign for Hurricane Sandy relief and longtime support for the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles and the Arthritis Foundation.

Honest about the roles

Christians can admire talent without pretending every story it served was good for us. Many of Pacino's most famous films are brutal and profane. "Scarface" is soaked in cocaine and violence. In HBO's "You Don't Know Jack," Pacino played assisted-suicide advocate Jack Kevorkian and won an Emmy for it. Families should choose carefully what they watch, and parents should not hand these films to children.

Yet the best of his work tells the truth about sin. "The Godfather" films are not a celebration of Michael Corleone. They are the slow ruin of a man who gains power and loses his family and his soul. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (Mark 8:36).

A gift and a journey

Skill like Pacino's is a gift, whether or not the one who has it gives credit to the Giver. "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above" (James 1:17). The craft he describes, showing up, learning the lines, working alongside others for decades, is worth honoring.

His line about having "wondered and wandered" most of his life is the most human thing in the announcement. Plenty of people who have won every award there is could say the same. Solomon had wealth, fame and achievement too, and called it "vanity and vexation of spirit" (Ecclesiastes 1:14). The wandering only ends at home with God. That invitation is still open to Pacino, as it is to every one of us.

The ceremony will stream on Netflix, a company Dock Line wrote about this week as it cut about 1,000 jobs.

Hero photo: Bernard Gotfryd / Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.