Unfortunately, LaMotta was so blatant - standing still in the Madison Square Garden ring to allow Fox to hit him - that the authorities were forced to intervene, fining him and suspending him for seven months. In the mob-controlled boxing world of the 40s, a fighter had to play ball to get his shot at the big-time, and LaMotta complied, throwing a bout with Billy Fox in 1947.
As a boxer his endurance and appetite for punishment served him well and led to his nickname, the Bronx Bull. In the years since, the fact De Niro put on 60 pounds to play the older LaMotta has certainly overshadowed the boxer’s real career.īorn in New York in 1922, from an early age LaMotta ran wild in the streets, eventually ending up in a reformatory. The actor’s Oscar-winning performance became a master class in having your cake and eating it: The inarticulate bully’s worst inclinations were shown, as were the steps - however faltering - to some notion of self-awareness.
No longer a savage brawler given to beating up the women in his life, LaMotta was effectively rehabilitated by De Niro’s depiction. The critical success of the film, and the dark charisma of De Niro’s portrayal of LaMotta in particular, cast a retrospective glow over the boxer’s career. The book was published in 1970 and 10 years later it became one of the great films of the decade, a study of male strength and weakness in atmospheric black and white, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro in the title role. The reason LaMotta had such a long post-career afterlife is the movie made out of his autobiography, Raging Bull: My Story. Yet LaMotta is better known now than any of his legendary contemporaries such as Robinson or even the man he replaced as king of the middleweights, the great French stylist Marcel Cerdan. Away from the ring he was a criminal: A self-confessed rapist who beat several of his (six) wives, he spent time in a reformatory as a teenager and was convinced for many years he’d killed a man he’d beaten savagely in a robbery: Only when he met his victim years later - alive, though scarred - did he realise the truth.
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