Marcello Mastroianni

Marcello Mastroianni: The Face of Italian Cinema

When he died in Paris in December 1996, the city of Rome turned off the Trevi Fountain and draped it in black. It was the only fitting tribute to the man who had waded into it beside Anita Ekberg in *La Dolce Vita*, the actor whose weary, elegant, faintly bemused face had come to stand for postwar Italian cinema itself. Marcello Mastroianni was, in Britannica's phrase, "the screen symbol of the modern European," and he wore that role as lightly as everything else.

A Carpenter's Son from Lazio

Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni was born September 26, 1924, in Fontana Liri, a village in the Apennines south of Rome. His father ran a carpentry shop, and the family moved between Turin and Rome. During the Second World War he was interned in a German labor camp but escaped and hid in Venice. He drifted into acting through Luchino Visconti's theater company in the late 1940s, and his brother Ruggero became a distinguished film editor who cut several of Marcello's pictures. He appeared, uncredited, in a film at fourteen, but only committed to acting in the 1950s.

Fellini and the Making of an Icon

His partnership with Federico Fellini defined him. In *La Dolce Vita* (1960) he played Marcello Rubini, the disillusioned gossip journalist drifting through a decadent Rome, and became an international star. Three years later, in *8½* (1963), he played Guido Anselmi, a blocked film director drowning in his own memories and fantasies, in what many consider one of the greatest films ever made. Guido was widely read as Fellini's alter ego, and Mastroianni's ability to embody another artist's self-portrait, with all its vanity and paralysis, is among the subtlest achievements in screen acting.

The Range Beneath the Charm

Mastroianni was far more than Fellini's leading man. For Michelangelo Antonioni he played the emotionally arid novelist of *La Notte* (1961) opposite Jeanne Moreau. He revealed a gift for satire as the murderous, mustachioed Sicilian nobleman of *Divorce Italian Style* (1961), a performance that earned the first Academy Award nomination ever given for a non-English-language role. He formed one of cinema's great screen couples with Sophia Loren across eleven films from 1954 to 1994, from the bawdy comedy of *Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow* to the aching restraint of *A Special Day* (1977). Across roughly 150 films he moved between farce and desolation with what Britannica called "a mood of casual affability" that concealed real depth.

Honors and a Wandering Heart

He received three Academy Award nominations, won Best Actor at Cannes twice, took the Volpi Cup at Venice and an honorary Golden Lion in 1990, and was made a Knight Grand Cross of Italy in 1994. His private life was as storied as his career: married to Flora Carabella, he had celebrated relationships with Faye Dunaway, who called him the love of her life, and Catherine Deneuve, with whom he had his daughter Chiara. Yet he was famously modest about his fame, describing acting as a job rather than an art.

Why Marcello Is Called a Genius

The genius attributed to Mastroianni is that of interpretive subtlety, a mastery so understated it can look like doing nothing at all. His specific gift was the capacity to suggest an entire inner life, boredom, longing, self-disgust, tenderness, through the smallest adjustments of expression and posture, without ever seeming to act. Directors of the first rank, Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, De Sica, built films around that instrument, and his casting as artist-surrogates in both *8½* and *La Dolce Vita* suggests they trusted him to carry their own reflected image. Critics consistently rank him among the finest screen actors of the twentieth century, and the two Cannes prizes and three Oscar nominations are institutional confirmation. The honest counter-case is that Mastroianni himself resisted the language of genius, calling himself a workman who was often lucky in his collaborators, and it is true that his greatest performances are inseparable from the visionary directors who shaped them. But the consistency across four decades and dozens of registers argues for something more than luck. His genius was real, if quiet: the art of appearing effortless.

Legacy

Mastroianni died of pancreatic cancer on December 19, 1996, with his daughters and Deneuve at his side. He remains the enduring face of Italian cinema's golden age, the embodiment of a certain rueful, seductive modern man. His daughter Chiara continues the family's presence in film, and his performances in *8½* and *La Dolce Vita* are permanent fixtures of any serious account of the medium. Few actors have so completely become the image of their national cinema.

Achievements

• Golden Globe Awards — 1963
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
• Educated at Sapienza University of Rome
• Worked as actor and film actor