Al Pacino is getting SAG-AFTRA’s highest honor. The union announced on Thursday, October 15, that Pacino will be the 62nd recipient of the SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award, recognizing both his six-decade acting career and his humanitarian work. He will accept the tribute at the 33rd annual Actor Awards in Los Angeles early next year, according to the official announcement.
When and where to watch
Pacino will be presented with the award at The 33rd Annual Actor Awards Presented by SAG-AFTRA on Sunday, February 28, 2027, at the Shrine Auditorium & Expo Hall in Los Angeles. The ceremony streams live on Netflix at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT, so US viewers can watch it with a standard Netflix subscription. The Actor Awards, which have run since 1995, are the only televised awards show that exclusively honors actors, with winners chosen by SAG-AFTRA’s more than 160,000 members.
What SAG-AFTRA and Pacino said
The Life Achievement Award goes each year to an actor who fosters the “finest ideals of the acting profession,” and recipients are nominated and voted on by the union’s National Honors and Tributes Committee.
“Like so many actors, I have spent my life in awe and appreciation of the force of nature that is Al Pacino,” SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin said in the announcement. “When you watch him perform, you are witnessing a student and a master. Al Pacino is an artist of extraordinary courage, intensity and heart whose work has always set an exceptional standard of skill and talent.”
Pacino, 86, kept his own statement characteristically humble: “I wondered and wandered most of my life but have always felt at home with a script and my fellow actors. It’s the work and the actors along the way that have been among the greatest joys of my life. It’s an honor to be recognized by SAG-AFTRA in celebrating the journey.”
A career by the numbers
Pacino’s shelf already holds an Academy Award (best actor for “Scent of a Woman”), two Tony Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards and two Actor Awards, plus an AFI Life Achievement Award, the Golden Globes’ Cecil B. DeMille Award, a Kennedy Center Honor and a Venice Career Golden Lion, as Variety and the Associated Press note. His nine Oscar nominations stretch from “The Godfather,” “Serpico,” “The Godfather Part II,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and “And Justice for All” through “Dick Tracy,” “Glengarry Glen Ross” and 2019’s “The Irishman.”
The breakthrough came in 1972, when Francis Ford Coppola cast him as Michael Corleone in “The Godfather.” Roles in “Scarface,” “Heat,” “Donnie Brasco” and “The Insider” followed across the decades, and he has stayed busy: his recent films include “Dead Man’s Wire,” “In the Hand of Dante,” “Easy’s Waltz” and “Killing Castro.” On television he won Emmys for HBO’s “Angels in America” and “You Don’t Know Jack,” and he starred in Amazon’s “Hunters.”
The award also honors his off-screen work. Pacino’s humanitarian efforts include disaster relief telethons after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy, the ONE Campaign’s Make Poverty History initiative, and decades of support for the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, which earned him the Arthritis Foundation’s Jane Wyman Humanitarian Award in 2009.
Key dates at a glance
October 15, 2026: SAG-AFTRA names Pacino the 62nd Life Achievement Award recipient
February 28, 2027: 33rd annual Actor Awards stream live on Netflix, 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT
1972: “The Godfather” makes Pacino a star and earns his first Oscar nomination
1993: Pacino wins the best actor Oscar for “Scent of a Woman”
