What is Robert De Niro Net Worth and Salary?
Robert De Niro is an American film and stage actor, producer, and director who has a net worth of $500 million. Robert De Niro is one of cinema’s greatest actors, appearing in such classics as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and The Godfather II.
Outside of acting, Robert earned a substantial fortune as co-founder of the Nobu franchise of high-end restaurants and hotels. There are more than 40 Nobu locations in the world today. The empire generates several hundred million dollars in revenue each year.
According to the files that were released as part of his bitter divorce battle with Grace Hightower, his wife from 1997 to 2018, Robert’s net worth is at least $500 million. The filing also claimed that Robert earned between $250 million and $300 million between 2004 and 2018 alone between film salaries and business dividends.
Youth
De Niro was born on August 14, 1943 in New York City. He was the son of two artists. His mother Virginia Admiral was a painter and his father Robert De Niro Sr. was an abstract expressionist painter and sculptor. De Niro’s parents divorced when he was three, and he was subsequently raised by his mother in Greenwich Village.
At the age of ten, Robert made his stage debut as the Cowardly Lion in his school’s production of The Wizard of Oz. And thus the acting bug was caught. By the age of 16, he dropped out of school to pursue his acting dreams. De Niro studied under legendary trainers Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. At the age of 20, De Niro got his first role in the movie “The Wedding Party”, directed by Brian De Palma. The two would collaborate again in the film “Hi Mom”.
Robert didn’t gain full exposure until he played a dying baseball player in the movie “Bang the Drum Slowly.” De Niro began what would become a decades-long partnership with director Martin Scorsese with the film Mean Streets. In 1974, De Niro won his first Academy Award for playing a young Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather II.
The success of the film
De Niro’s career took off from there. He had a string of acclaimed performances from ‘Taxi Driver’ to ‘Deer Hunter’, the latter of which earned him another Oscar nomination. Travis Bickle’s role in “Taxi Driver” would turn him into an icon. His line “You talkin’ to me” (which De Niro improvised) would become a classic line in American cinema.
De Niro is a fierce actor. He worked as a taxi driver to play the role of Travis Bickle. He lived in Sicily for “The Godfather II”. He learned to play the saxophone for “New York, New York.” In 1980, he tried everything to play the role of boxer Jack Lamotta in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. De Niro learned to box and gained sixty pounds for the role. The effort proved well worth his while, with Robert going on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role.
In 1993, De Niro made his directorial debut with A Bronx Tale. The film was written by fellow actor Chazz Palmiteri and was based on his one-man show about Palminteri’s troubled youth. The film was panned but found a small following upon release. De Niro wouldn’t return to the director’s chair until 2006 with The Good Shepherd.
(Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
Personal life
De Niro currently resides in New York, where he is committed to building the TriBeca area. He invested his money and time into the TriBeca Film Festival, TriBeca Productions and The TriBeca grill.
In 1997, he married Grace Hightower. The two would have a son, Elliot, just one year later. Besides Elliot, De Niro has another son named Raphael, who was from his first marriage to Dianne Abbott. Adopted Abbott’s daughter, Drena, who was from a former relationship of Abbott’s. She also has twins from whom they were conceived through in vitro fertilization by a surrogate mother.
Robert filed for divorce in 1999, but they eventually reconciled until they separated for good in 2018. More details on their divorce battle in a few paragraphs.
Business business
Apart from acting, Robert De Niro is the co-founder of the highly successful Nobu restaurant chain with Nobu Matsuhisa. Today there are more than 40 Nobu locations in the world. The Nobu empire has been reported to generate several hundred million dollars in revenue each year. Robert is also co-owner of The Greenwhich Hotel in New York.
In 2017, Robert and Australian billionaire James Packer announced a planned luxury resort called “Paradise Found” to be located on the Eastern Caribbean island of Barbuda.
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The Divorce Battle
In June 2019, Robert’s ex-wife Grace Hightower filed legal documents as part of their ongoing divorce that provide intimate details about their finances and assets.
According to Grace’s filing, Robert’s net worth is at least $500 million and that he earned $250-$300 million between 2004 and 2018 alone, much of which came from his expanding Nobu empire. According to the terms of a prenuptial agreement the two signed in 2004, Grace was reportedly owed $1 million a year for the number of years they were married, a $6 million apartment, $500,000 in . and half the value of their principal residence. However, Ms Hightower filed motions seeking 50% of the actor’s fortune, claiming he had kept her in the dark about his finances for more than a decade.
A later interpretation of the prenuptial agreement, as revealed in court documents, called for Robert to pay Grace $1 million in any year she earned at least $15 million, which is most years. If he earned less, he would pay Grace proportionately less.
In July 2020, as the divorce continued, Grace filed a complaint in court, stating that Robert unfairly reduced her monthly American Express allowance from $100,000 to $50,000. De Niro’s response claimed that due to the COVID-19 crisis, his income has dried up and his business empire is in free fall. It turns out that he had to borrow $500,000 to cover some of Nobu’s ever-increasing debt. His lawyers claimed Nobu lost $3 million in April and $1.9 million in May. His lawyers also claimed that De Niro would be “lucky to make $7.5 million” in 2020.
Hightower’s lawyers argued that Robert had:
” he used the COVID pandemic… to stick financially with his wife. I don’t think a man who is worth $500 million and makes $30 million a year all of a sudden in March needs to cut [ întreținerea soțului] by 50 percent and ban her from the house “.
The judge in the case ultimately ruled that reducing the Amex allowance to $50,000 was not unreasonable, but also ordered Robert to pay Grace $75,000 to help find a summer home because Robert currently lives in their former main house.
