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Marcello Mastroianni
| Biography |
During WWII Marcello Mastroianni’s was sent to a German prison camp, but he managed to escape and hide in Venice.
In 1945 he started working for the Italian department of Lion Films, Eagle at Rome and joined a drama club, where he was discovered by director, Luchino Visconti.
He made his "official" movie debut in the film 'I Miserabili', (1947) and soon became a leading man in popular films like 'Cronache di poveri amanti' (1954) and 'La Bella mugnaia' (1955).
In 1957, Visconti gave him the starring part in his Dostoievski adaptation, 'Le Notti bianche', but his real breakthrough came in 1960, when Federico Fellini cast him as an attractive, weary-eyed journalist of the Rome jet-set, in 'La Dolce Vita'. The film was the genesis of his "Latin lover" persona, which Mastroianni himself often denied, by accepting parts of passive and sensitive men.
He would again work with Fellini in several major films, like the exquisite '8 1/2' (1963) and the touching 'Ginger e Fred' (1985), as an old entertainer who appears in a TV show.
He also appeared as a tired novelist with marital problems in Michelangelo Antonioni's 'La Notte'. As well as in Mauro Bolognini's 'Il Bell' Antonio', John Boorman's 'Leo the Last', Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's 'Allonsanfan' and, as a sensitive homosexual in love with a housewife, in Ettore Scola's 'Una Giornata particolare'.
During the last decade of his life he worked with directors like Theo Angelopoulos, Bertrand Blier and Raoul Ruiz, who gave him three excellent parts in 'Trois vies & une seule mort' (1996).
He died of pancreatic cancer in 1996.
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