Having vowed never to play a mobster again, Robert De Niro has signed up to portray a retired mafia hit man who gets sucked back into the life after an assassination attempt on him.
The thriller, entitled "The Winter of Frankie Machine," is to be based on a yet-to-be-published novel by author and screenwriter Don Winslow. De Niro won an Oscar for his role as the young Don Vito Corleone in "The Godfather II" and went on to virtually create the classic Italian mobster figure in cinema, most recently doing the voiceover for a mob shark in the animated film "Shark Tale."