The day I met Jake LaMotta, 'greatest middleweight that ever lived', at his favourite restaurant in New York

It’s late September 1997 and Mark Collings, rookie boxing reporter, blags an interview with his hero for Esquire magazine

Mark Collings

Sunday 21 May 2017

I met Jake LaMotta at his favourite restaurant, La Maganette, on the corner of 50th and 3rd in Manhattan, two weeks after the death of Princess Diana in 1997. It was one of those molten hot late summer New York days, but I had a wool suit and tie on. Beforehand I’d read a quote from LaMotta that said, “If you are somebody, you dress like somebody,” so I had decided to wear my only suit. I was drinking ice-cold Coca-Cola, trying to stop myself from sweating, when Jake arrived. “He’s just a baby!” he said to his son Jake Jr, gesturing towards me. I was 25, but looked younger than my age.

Jake LaMotta / Gallery

Vikki and Jake LaMotta

Jake LaMotta

GALERÍA

Jack LaMotta

Robert De Niro and Jack LaMotta

Jack LaMotta and Robert De Niro

Robert De Niro and Jack La Motta

 

Raging Bull at 40: Scorsese's brutal boxing saga still bruises

Robert De Niro’s Oscar-winning performance as Jake LaMotta remains chilling yet it’s a defiant refusal to soften a deeply unlikable lead character that hits hardest

Guy Lodge
Friday 13 November 2020

T

here is a tendency among audiences – including, sometimes, even the best of critics – to judge movies by how much we warm to their characters. An “unlikable protagonist” surfaces again and again in reviews as a strike against a film: a problem, certainly, in a romantic comedy where you’d rather throttle both leads than applaud their happy ending.

Jake LaMotta

Jake LaMotta: a flawed character alchemised by Raging Bull into a mythical figure

 

LaMotta was immortalised on screen by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, but their brilliant 1980 movie remade boxing history in the process

Peter Bradshaw

Thursday 21 September 2017

“Now, sometimes, at night, when I think back, I feel like I’m looking at an old black-and-white movie of myself. Why it should be black-and-white, I don’t know, but it is. Not a good movie, either, jerky, with gaps in it, a string of poorly lit sequences, some of them with no beginning and no end.”

Jake LaMotta

Jake LaMotta, former boxer whose life was subject of Raging Bull, dies aged 95

Bryan Armen Graham

Wed 20 September 2017

 

Jake LaMotta, the Bronx boxer who captured the world middleweight championship in 1949 and whose turbulent life was later the subject of the 1980 film Raging Bull, died on Tuesday because of complications from pneumonia. He was 95.