‘I don’t believe in God – I believe in Al Pacino’: How one of our greatest living actors kicked his boozy, brawling ways

msn.com:

Al Pacino spent much of the Seventies in a drunken haze. The Oscar-winning star of the Godfather trilogy, Serpico, Scarface and Scent of a Woman has been teetotal for more than four decades now, and is about to soberly celebrate his 80th birthday.

But he drank so much in his younger days that his brain was, in his own words, “scrambled”. He would down beers along with martini chasers, the alcohol serving as an antidote to his natural shyness, a way for him to cope with the intense burden of being in the public eye.

Drinking was part of the culture of his trade at the time, he would later explain, recalling that even a thespian as eminent as Sir Laurence Olivier cited “the drink after the show” as his favourite part of acting.