I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew.

Looking past the controversy The Last Temptation of Christ gained critical acclaim and remains an important work in Scorsese's canon: an explicit attempt to wrestle with the spirituality which had under-pinned his films up until that point. It was highly lauded by critics upon original release but was a box office bomb making an overall loss. His father was a clothes presser and an actor and his mother was a seamstress and an actress.

Scorsese is hailed as one of the most significant and influential filmmakers of all time directing landmark films such as Mean Streets (1973) Taxi Driver (1976) Raging Bull (1980) and Goodfellas (1990) – all of which he collaborated on with actor and close friend Robert De Niro. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation a non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation. Martin Charles Scorsese (pron.