Focus Features

66 years ago today in New York City, Martin Marcantonio Luciano Scorsese came into the world; nowadays, he is known to all lovers of film as simply “Marty.” The roots of all of Scorsese’s thematic tropes and preoccupations can be traced back to his childhood: his parents were working class folk living in Manhattan’s bustling, mob-controlled Garment District and, as devout Catholics of Sicilian extraction, made sure that their little boy had religion central as a central part of his life. Indeed Scorsese, like his alter ego Charlie in Mean Streets, was on course to become a priest, but could not resist the pull of his true vocation: cinema. As the Oscar-winning director himself explains in his splendid TV 1995 series A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, movies became a fascination and an integral part of his life early in his childhood after watching films like Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief and Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City and Paisà. (Scorsese would later marry Isabella Rossellini, the great Italian’s daughter with Ingrid Bergman.) Scorsese would regularly go to the movie theater with his father in his childhood and adolescence and from his short films of the 1960s onwards, cast his parents numerous times in minor roles in his movies, never forgetting his debt to them or where he had come from.