Al Pacino to Receive the Actors Union’s Highest Honor at February’s Actor Awards

Al Pacino, whose performances as Michael Corleone, Frank Serpico and Tony Montana made him one of the defining screen actors of his generation, will receive SAG-AFTRA’s Life Achievement Award, the actors union announced Thursday.

Pacino, 86, is the 62nd recipient of the honor, the union’s highest, which recognizes both an actor’s career and humanitarian work. He will be celebrated at the 33rd Actor Awards, presented by SAG-AFTRA, on Feb. 28, 2027, at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall in Los Angeles. The show will stream live on Netflix.

Sean Astin, the union’s president, praised Pacino as a force of nature, saying that watching him work is like seeing both a student and a master of the craft at once, and that he is simply fun to watch. Pacino said in a statement released by the union that he has always felt at home with a script and his fellow actors, and that working alongside them has been one of the great joys of his life. He called the award a recognition of that journey.

Born Alfredo James Pacino in New York, he struggled to find steady work in the 1960s before his breakthrough as Michael Corleone in “The Godfather” in 1972, the role that earned him his first Academy Award nomination. He went on to play Frank Serpico in “Serpico” and Tony Montana in “Scarface,” and won the Oscar for best actor for “Scent of a Woman,” playing the retired Lt. Col. Frank Slade. That same year he also earned a supporting actor nomination for “Glengarry Glen Ross.” His role in “The Irishman” in 2019 brought his ninth nomination.

His work extends well beyond film. He won Emmy and Golden Globe awards for the television productions “Angels in America” and “You Don’t Know Jack,” and has won two Tony Awards for his stage work. He has also received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award, the Golden Globes’ Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Kennedy Center Honor.

The union also cited his charitable work, including disaster relief, efforts against hunger and poverty, his participation in the 2001 “America: A Tribute to Heroes” telethon after the Sept. 11 attacks, and benefit performances for the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles. In 2009 he received the Arthritis Foundation’s Jane Wyman Humanitarian Award.

Lifetime honors are sometimes criticized for rewarding fame more than recent work. In Pacino’s case, the record speaks for itself: a career spanning more than six decades across film, television and theater, and characters that remain fixtures of American movie culture.