“To me, he was always a great artist,” Robert De Niro tells Out magazine, speaking about his gay father, Robert De Niro, Sr. “He probably was [conflicted about being gay], being from that generation, especially from a small town upstate. I was not aware, much, of it. I wish we had spoken about it much more. My mother didn’t want to talk about things in general, and you’re not interested when you’re a certain age.”
De Niro feels it is his “responsibility” to share the life and creations of his father, in the documentary Remembering the Artist: Robert De Niro, Sr, which airs June 9 on HBO. The senior De Niro never received recognition for his art in his lifetime and died 20 years ago from cancer.
“We were not the type of father and son who played baseball together, as you can surmise,” De Niro says. “But we had a connection. I wasn’t with him a lot, because my mother and he were separated and divorced. As I say in the documentary, I looked after him in certain ways.”
Check out the trailer:
Why you can trust Xtra
