Why Robert De Niro Was Nicknamed “Bobby Milk” as a Kid

A-list stars in Hollywood were often just as well known by their nicknames as their real names. Lana Turner was “The Sweater Girl.” Jean Harlow was the first “Blonde Bombshell.” Rock Hudson’s height and physique earned him the nickname “The Baron of Beefcake,” which he later shared with Tony Curtis. It’s a trend that hasn’t survived, unfortunately.

But we can apparently add Robert De Niro to that list, thanks to a somewhat unflattering childhood nickname, “Bobby Milk.” 

A Creative Childhood in Greenwich Village

De Niro was born in New York in 1943, and grew up in an intensely creative household in Greenwich Village. Both of his parents—his half-Irish, half-Italian father, also named Robert (but known familiarly as Bob) and his mother Virginia Admiral—were abstract artists, with Virginia in particular enjoying some early success in the 1940s with an exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery in Manhattan, and another of her works purchased by the New York Museum of Modern Art. 

Their loft home on Bleecker Street became a kind of open salon for artists, critics, thinkers, and creatives alike. Young Robert grew up around the likes of Anaïs Nin, the movie critic Manny Farber, the poet Robert Duncan, and art essayist Clement Greenberg, and amid discussions of philosophy, modernism, religion, and theology. It wasn’t quite as glamorous as it might sound, though. “Nobody had any money at all,” the American artist Buffie Johnson once recalled of her time at the De Niro’s home. “A loft with very thin walls,” is how Nin described their home in her diaries, meanwhile adding that the couple once rowed so loudly that a fellow artist who lived next door was able to weigh in on their argument.

Virginia and Bob amicably split in 1945, after Bob admitted to an affair with Duncan and came out as gay. Virginia then took her then two-year-old son and moved into an apartment on West 14th Street, and there began working as a typist to make ends meet, eventually setting up a successful office bureau service alongside her painting. Young Robert divided his time between his two parents, but when both were busy working, he was often left with little to do but wander the streets of Greenwich Village and Little Italy. And it was there that he fell in with one of the growing number of gangs on New York’s streets in mid-20th century New York. 

From "Bobby Milk" to Stardom

By the 1950s, the city was changing, and Greenwich Village in particular was becoming home to an increasing number of Italian and Sicilian families. Robert was drawn to the gangs’ style and demeanor, and he reportedly adopted their silk shirt and leather jacket fashions in an attempt to blend in. Being a quarter Irish, however, meant that teenage Robert looked noticeably paler than his new gang of friends, and as a result they came up with a nickname that played on his characteristic pallor: “Bobby Milk.” 

Fortunately, the gang lifestyle didn’t stick, and at 16 years old Robert dropped out of school to study acting with Stella Adler. A string of Off-Off-Broadway credits followed, before he made his first film appearance in Brian De Palma’s The Wedding Party in 1963. As it happens, copyright disputes and final-cut credits meant that the film would not be released until 1969, by which time Robert De Niro’s—or rather, Bobby Milk’s—star was well and truly on the rise.

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