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Rise to Fame
Three years in the Marines, a stint in Lebanon during Operation Blue Bat in 1958, then a decade as a court stenographer. Harvey Keitel was 28 before he got his first film role. That film was Martin Scorsese's debut, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967), which set a pattern: Keitel kept showing up in important films, usually as the moral weight, rarely as the star. Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976) made him a fixture of New York's gritty new cinema, but Hollywood never quite figured out how to market him.
In the Spotlight
His profile jumped in the early 1990s when he co-produced Reservoir Dogs (1992), helping push Tarantino's budget from $30,000 to $1.5 million. That same year, he played the corrupt, self-destructing cop in Bad Lieutenant, an NC-17 performance Roger Ebert called 'one of the great screen performances in recent years.' Pulp Fiction's Winston Wolf came next. He keeps working, collecting indie thriller credits deep into his eighties. Co-running the Actors Studio with Al Pacino and Ellen Burstyn is the kind of institutional role you take when the industry finally admits it owes you something.
Side Notes
He's fluent in Yiddish, holds a black belt in karate, and practices Buddhism. In boot camp, he kept kosher, handing off his milk whenever meat was served. That court stenographer job before acting was almost too perfect a research gig for someone who'd spend his career playing criminals and corrupt cops. Hollywood explicitly never considered him 'bankable,' which is a strange thing to admit about someone who appeared in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Reservoir Dogs, Bad Lieutenant, and Pulp Fiction.