Director Bernardo Bertolucci, the last Paris tango, dies at the age of 77

Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, who won the Oscars with The last emperor and whose erotic drama Last Tango in Paris fascinated and shocked the world, died at 77 years old.

Bertolucci's press office, Punto e Virgola, confirmed the death in an email to The Associated Press. According to the Italian RAI, Bertolucci died at home in Rome, surrounded by his family.

Bertolucci's films have often explored the sexual relations between characters plunged into a psychological crisis, as in Last tango. The so-called Marxist did not fled politics and ideology either, as in The conformist, Which some critics consider Bertolucci's masterpiece.

READ MORE:
* Bertolucci reacts to the shock of a rape scene
* Bertolucci, Brando stained by a butter scene
* Bertolucci responds to Schneider's criticisms

Although he has worked with leading American and international stars, Bertolucci has always defended his own style of filmmaking against what he claimed to be the pressure of the American film industry. He maintained critical success for most of his career, overcoming the controversies that his work of sexual provocation would spark and some commercial failures.

"Regarding commercial cinema, I feel a strange pleasure to feel that I'm from another tribe, an infiltrator," he told the Italian daily. Corriere della Sera in 1990.

He was honored for his achievements at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011.

Bertolucci's films also bear the imprint of the director's personal experiences in psychoanalysis.

He always said that making movies was his way of communicating with the public. It was his personal language.

"Maybe I'm an idealist, but I still think of cinema as a cathedral where we are all dreaming of this dream together," he said after receiving an award from the Guild of American Directors for his film of 1987 The last emperor.

This film has given Bertolucci its greatest success. In 1988, he won the nine Oscars for which he was nominated, including the best film and the best director.

The film – the first Western feature film to obtain permission to shoot in the Forbidden City in Beijing – traces the life of the last Chinese emperor, from the child king at the end of the Qing Dynasty to a criminal of war and finally to an ordinary citizen of the People's Republic.

It was filmed in lush and vivid style that was one of Bertolucci's hallmarks. It featured grandiose scenes and intimate moments, as well as a typical back-to-back structure of biopics.

Director of Photography Vittorio Storaro, who has often worked with Bertolucci and won one of his three Oscars with Last emperor, Compared the director to William Faulkner.

"His style is reminiscent of Faulkner's, which will run 30 pages without a dot." Bernardo does not use the camera to convey a single sentence – everything mingles with everything else, "Storaro said.

Bertolucci was born on March 16, 1941 in Parma, a city in northern Brazil, son of the poet Attilio Bertolucci and his wife Ninetta. The family moved to Rome when Bertolucci was 13 years old.

Bertolucci was married to English writer and director Clare Peploe. They did not have children.

Punto e Virgola, from the press office, said the details of the funeral arrangements have not yet been finalized, but that he is expecting a ceremony in the coming days.