Al Pacino to Receive SAG’s Life Achievement Award

Al Pacino will receive the SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award at the 33rd annual Actor Awards in February, SAG-AFTRA announced on Thursday. Over his near-60-year career, Pacino has won an Academy Award, two Tonys, two Emmys and two Actor Awards. His previous lifetime-achievement honors include an AFI Life Achievement Award, a Kennedy Center Honor and the Golden Globes’ Cecil B. DeMille Award. He has been nominated for three Actor Awards for his TV performances in “Angels in America,” “You Don’t Know Jack” and “Phil Spector,” winning for the first two. His only individual Actor Award nomination for a film performance came for “The Irishman” in 2020, though he also received noms as part of the ensemble casts of that film, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and “House of Gucci.” The Screen Actors Guild launched the Actor Awards in 1995 as the SAG Awards, which meant that the honor did not exist when Pacino turned in some of his most acclaimed performances in “The Panic in Needle Park,” “The Godfather” trilogy, “Scarecrow,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Scarface,” “Carlito’s Way,” “Scent of a Woman” and others. The awards’ name was changed last year. “Like so many actors, I have spent my life in awe and appreciation of the force of nature that is Al Pacino,” SAG-AFTRA president Sean Astin said in a statement. “When you watch him perform, you are witnessing a student and a master. Al Pacino is an artist of extraordinary courage, intensity and heart whose work has always set an exceptional standard of skill and talent. All of that and he’s just plain fun to watch.” In response to the honor, Pacino said in his own statement, “I wondered and wandered most of my life but have always felt at home with a script and my fellow actors. It’s the work and the actors along the way that have been among the greatest joys of my life.” Recent recipients of the SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award include Harrison Ford, Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Sally Field, Helen Mirren, Robert De Niro, Alan Alda and Morgan Freeman. The award was presented annually for more than three decades before the SAG Awards was created, with early recipients including Eddie Cantor, Stan Laurel, Bob Hope and Barbara Stanwyck. Pacino will become the 62nd recipient. The Actor Awards Presented by SAG-AFTRA will take place on Sunday, Feb. 28, 2027, at the Shrine Auditorium & Exposition Hall in Los Angeles.