Word: mastroianni
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JERRY SHERLOCK, director, New York Film Academy: "Pret-a-Porter [1994; 4], because they put Marcello Mastroianni, a fine actor, in that piece...
...life, from the beginning, was hardly boring. Born in Fontana Liri, 50 miles outside Rome, to a carpenter who went blind and a housewife who went deaf ("They were like a comic couple," he said), Mastroianni did time in a German labor camp during World War II, then escaped to Venice and later to Luchino Visconti's famed Milan theater troupe. The screen had to claim this face, so sensitive, masculine and alert, but it took a decade or more for him to achieve true Marcellosity. In Visconti's rapturous White Nights (1957), Mastroianni spent the whole movie pleading fruitlessly...
...older, world-weary image--a touch of gray at the temples, a wistfulness for waylaid innocence--that made Mastroianni a worldwide star. As the Dolce Vita gossipist, the moviemaker in Fellini's great 8 1/2 (1963) and the writer in Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte (1961), he moved like a man in perpetual postcoital ennui, elevating spiritual passivity to a metaphysic and a fashion statement. "Mastroianni" became a kind of emotional cologne for the modern male. And no one wore the style as elegantly as he: the dark suit, the narrow tie, the eyes of a man who's been...
...Mastroianni was also a clown, yelping like a hyena in heat when Sophia Loren (his partner in 13 films) strips for him in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963). As the Sicilian aristocrat in Pietro Germi's wonderfully malicious Divorce Italian Style (1962), he is a creature of tics and slouches, plotting his wife's death and stalking the seraphic Stefania Sandrelli with the gait of a mopey Groucho. He made informed fun not only of these familiar Italian comic figures but also of his own star machismo. At the end of a guest stint on Laugh-In, TV's vaudeville...
...While Mastroianni worked and wooed around the world, his one and only wife of 46 years stoically stayed home. "Perhaps I don't be so faithful," he said in 1987. "Whoever lives with an actor has to accept that he needs to live a little in his fantasies." Perhaps Flora accepted him, as moviegoers did, for the contradictory beguiler...