Al Pacino turns 86 today and has chosen this milestone — the way that men of a certain age and a certain hard-won self-awareness sometimes do — to finally say out loud the things that a lifetime of work, fame, and carefully maintained privacy kept just beneath the surface of every interview he ever gave and every question he ever deflected with the actor’s instinct to reveal everything on screen and almost nothing off it.

The women Al Pacino loved across eight decades of living — Diane Keaton, whose relationship with him carried a depth and a tenderness that both of them have referenced across the years with the particular care people take when something genuinely mattered; Beverly D’Angelo, with whom he shared twins and a partnership that the public only partially understood; and the others who moved through a life that the work always, in the end, came first in — deserved more than a man so completely and so helplessly consumed by his craft was ever fully able to give, and the confession Al Pacino has made today about what he understood too late, about the love he held inadequately and the women who waited for a version of him that the work never quite released, is the accounting of a man standing at 86 with the full, unobstructed view of his own life and the courage, finally, to describe honestly what he sees from there.