Show Business: The Quiet Chameleon

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"Yeah, well... I think that... umm ... you know ... uh-hah." Actor Robert DeNiro is not voluble. Nor, offscreen, is he particularly visible. Lean, with lanky brown hair and narrow, green-brown eyes, a pallid face by turns near-handsome and homely, he has the protective coloration of a chameleon.

But turn a camera or raise a curtain on him and the reticent, barely descript DeNiro undergoes a metamorphosis. In Bang the Drum Slowly, he remade himself into a slovenly, Southern-bumpkin, baseball player; in Mean Streets, into a jittery, petty street hoodlum. Now, with his portrayal of the young Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II, DeNiro, 31, has come fully and formidably into his own as a character actor of range and depth.

DeNiro's young Don is a precise, elegant understatement, a portrait of a peasant aristocrat in an ill-fitting suit. His movements are sure, deliberate, catlike, his eyes icy; he is most frightening in a single, beautiful smile that seems the last flicker of human warmth in a young man resolved to become a killer.

Notebook Research. DeNiro is not a Hollywood but a New York actor, a term loosely used to describe a certain style and attitude, with implications of seriousness, stage-oriented technique and lengthy, underpaid apprenticeship. DeNiro has been plugging away at his profession for 14 years, through workshop productions, off-off-Broadway, dinner theaters, touring companies and a number of unsung independent films. Friends describe DeNiro as demonic, obsessive, perfectionist. He researches a role like a counter-intelligence agent cramming for a new identity. In his tiny, crabbed script, he fills one small notebook after another with research. DeNiro says he concocts an entire biography for a character: "Where he is from, where he is going, how he holds his knife and fork." For Bang the Drum, DeNiro, who had never played baseball, spent weeks in south Georgia and in spring-training camps in Florida learning the life of a tobacco-chawing Dixie ballplayer. "The first day I got to Georgia," DeNiro recalls, "I met a guy in a pickup truck and he drove me around. I taped his voice, other voices, even the mayor of the town." As for the tobacco, "you get nauseous at first."

Since his Godfather II role was Sicilian to its mol ten core, he spent six weeks in Sicily mastering not only the regional dialect but a specific local variant. Challenged to play the young immigrant who would become the Godfather already denned by Marlon Brando, De Niro armed himself with a video tape of Brando's performance. "I didn't want to do an imitation, but I want ed to make it believable that I could be him as a young man. I would see some little movements that he would do and try to link them with my performance. It was like a mathematical problem —having a result and figuring out how to make the begin fit."

DeNiro grew up on the streets of Manhattan's Greenwich Village. His parents, both artists, were separated when he was two. At ten, he briefly attended Saturday acting classes at New York's New School but soon turned to "hanging around" in flashy silk suits.