Cybill Shepherd, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster and Harvey Keitel pose at the "Taxi Driver" 40th anniversary screening during the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival at Beacon Theatre on April 21, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival)
Keitel was originally hired to play Captain Willard in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, but a few weeks into the shooting, Coppola did not like Keitel’s portrayal and replaced him with Martin Sheen.
A comprehensive look at Keitel’s career would be a volume in itself, but he has appeared in countless major movies. From 1985-1988, he was one of the busiest actors in Hollywood, appearing in 16 films and television movies. In 1991 he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Mickey Cohen in Bugsy. His high-profile roles over the years are numerous: The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), The Two Jakes (1990), Thelma & Louise (1991), Sister Act (1992), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Bad Lieutenant (1992), The Piano (1993), Clockers (1995), Little Nicky (2000) , U-571(2000), National Treasure (2004) , National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007), Three Seasons (1999), Holy Smoke! (1999), Taking Sides (2001), The Grey Zone (2001), and The Irishman (2019).
Over the many years of his career, Keitel has not been shy about disclosing his history of stuttering. The biography Harvey Keitel: The Art of Darkness contains a major passage about his speech odyssey:
Home life was something else: ‘I’ve had many problems in my life that I’ve had to get through, beginning with being a little boy,’ Keitel observed.
Such as the fact that he began stuttering at the age of six or seven, a problem that carried on into his teens. What is a painful and emotionally challenging period in anyone’s life became excruciating for a young man who stuttered:
‘It was a huge, huge, deep, deep, embarrassment, the object of humiliation by other children.
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It took years to go away. I still stutter at times. The stutter is the result of something else. It’s sort of a road to your identity. It’s a clue about something, it’s a clue about disturbance.’
‘It was very painful because I was shy to begin with. Confrontation means asserting yourself. Stuttering is an attempt to stop the assertion of the self. I can’t think of anything more frustrating or more detrimental to evolving than not allowing yourself whatever thought comes to mind.’
In an October 18, 1992, article in the Los Angeles Times, “Leaps of Faith: Harvey Keitel’s Search for God Often Involves Confronting His Darker Self,” Keitel’s stuttering is addressed when the article describes how in 1964, in the fifth year of his ten year career as a court stenographer, he agreed to a friend’s suggestion that they go for acting lessons. The article stated, “Though Keitel had struggled with a stuttering problem since childhood, he agreed to give it a shot.”
In “Harvey Keitel: What I’ve Learned”, a January 24, 2016, profile in Esquire, the proud native of Brooklyn addressed his stuttering by saying, “When I was a little boy I had a stutter. I still stutter, but much less. Back then it was a real champion stutter. In time it faded away, for the most part. Now it seems to be returning a little bit. Maybe because I’m so fatigued. I don’t mean just now, but in these years.”
Harvey Keitel spoke about his stuttering on national television in an interview on CBS Sunday Morning with co-host Anthony Mason on December 15, 2019. When asked about his “pretty nasty” childhood stutter, Keitel responded, “You can hear it now.” When Anthony Mason said that he could not, he said matter-of-factly, “Then I’m doing a good job of hiding it.”
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