Al Pacino 'forever haunted' by childhood injury to his penis

In his newly released memoir - Sonny Boy, Al Pacino has spoken in detail about an injury on his penis which he sustained when he was just 10 years old. The Godfather star, 84, revealed that he is haunted by the thought of the childhood injury even today. At the time, he was living in New York's South Bronx. 

"I was walking on a thin, iron fence, doing my tightrope dance," Pacino wrote in the book. "It had been raining all morning, and sure enough, I slipped and fell, and the iron bar hit me directly between my legs."

He recalled being hunched over and moaning in "such pain" that he could not make it home. Luckily, an older gentleman helped him get up and he took him to his aunt’s house, where a house doctor helped him with the injury.

"I lay there on the bed, with my pants completely down around my ankles as the three women in my life — my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother — poked and prodded at my penis in a semipanic," Pacino wrote in the memoir.

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"I thought, God, please take me now, as I heard them whispering things to one another as they conducted their inspection."

He further stated that his penis "remained attached, along with the trauma."

"To this day I’m haunted by the thought of it," he added.

To the wider world, Al Pacino exploded onto the scene like a supernova. He landed his first leading role, in The Panic in Needle Park, in 1971, and by 1975, he had starred in four movies: The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon.

These films were not just successes but landmarks in the history of film. Those performances became legendary and changed his life forever. Not since Marlon Brando and James Dean in the late 1950s had an actor landed in the culture with such force.