Al Pacino Confesses He’s An ‘Idiot’ With Money & Went ‘Broke,’ Spent $400,000 Yearly On Landscaping For House He Didn’t Live In

Despite his acclaim as a Hollywood star, Al Pacino has revealed that his spending habits have continually placed him in severe financial trouble.

In his new memoir Sonny Boy, Pacino revealed, “When I finished making The Godfather, I was broke, not that I ever had any money, but now I owed money…my manager and agents got their cuts of my salary while I had to live on support from [ex-girlfriend] Jill Clayburgh.”

Pacino made $35,000 for his role as Michael Corleone in the first installment of The Godfather and he reprised the 1972 role in 1974 due to his money struggles.

“I had about ninety grand in the bank, and that was it,” he wrote. “I could say I got taken advantage of. I could blame my accountants. I could blame [my manager] Mary Bregman, who had put me into some sort of tax shelter that went south. I could blame myself, but then I’d have to take responsibility for my own actions.”

Pacino remembered how his former girlfriend Diane Keaton had previously told his lawyers that Pacino could not be trusted with finances and was an “idiot” who needed supervision. Pacino acknowledged that Keaton was not wrong, as he really “didn’t understand” how to manage his money and career.

As Pacino’s career grew, so did his team and family and, subsequently, his financial requirements.

“My staff was getting bigger, and I was taking care of two homes, my apartments, and an office, and supporting the households of my children…I was spending three or four hundred thousand dollars a month, which is a lot of moolah,” he wrote.

Pacino later had a brief stint with financial security due to an (unnamed) accountant, who was later found to be running a Ponzi scheme and was imprisoned. Pacino explained, “I had fifty million dollars, and then I had nothing…I had property but I didn’t have any money…the kind of money I was spending and where it was going was just a crazy montage of loss.”

With his impressive bank account, loaded with money from his movies, Pacino owned 16 cars and 23 cell phones and paid “$400,000 a year” to landscape a house he did not live in.

“I wasn’t even signing my own checks – the accountant signed them, and I just let them go by. I wasn’t looking, and he didn’t tell me how much I had or where it was going,” Pacino wrote.

Pacino noted that later in life, the same financial opportunities in the industry “weren’t coming around anymore.” He had a role in the 2011 comedy Jack and Jill and proceeded to appear in a number of “really bad films,” which he did not specify.

As he focuses on his estate, Pacino noted that he had since enlisted the help of people who are “way smarter” than him when it comes to money.

Sonny Boy was released on October 15, 2024, and is available on Amazon.

At 83, Pacino recently had a son, his fourth child, but his wife filed for divorce last September.