Death of Bernardo Bertolucci, director of the last Tango in Paris, at the age of 77 | Movie

Bernardo Bertolucci, the award-winning Italian director of Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor and The Dreamers, died at the age of 77 after a battle with cancer, confirmed his publicist. He had been confined to a wheelchair for more than ten years. In 2003, a disc hernia operation failed him and made him unable to walk.

Bertolucci has become a key figure in the extraordinary new Italian wave (alongside Antonioni, Fellini and Pasolini) during a film career dating back to the early 1960s, but he did a unique transition to the big-scale Hollywood filmmaking with The Last Emperor in 1987, which won nine Oscars, including best film and director for Bertolucci.

Bertolucci was born in Parma in 1940, son of a poet and teacher, and was raised in a literary and artistic atmosphere. His father, Attilio, was friends with Pier-Paolo Pasolini, then a novelist and poet, and Pasolino hired 20-year-old Bertolucci as assistant to his first album, Accattone, in 1961. That's Bertolucci's big breakthrough: Pasolini helped him further by recommending him as a scriptwriter for La Commare Secca, which became Bertolucci's first film as a director.

Bertolucci continued to contribute as a writer and man of ideas, including the epic of Sergio Leone's western spaghetti, Once Upon a Time in West. But his career as a director began with Before the Revolution (1964), a Parma account of the connection of a Marxist student with his aunt and the influential The Conformist (1970), both of whom brought to the forefront the Bertolucci's commitment to radical left-wing politics. "I lived in a sort of dream of communism," he later remarked.

The conformist also marked the beginning of Bertolucci's collaboration with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (who was a cameraman before the revolution). Together, they would create a series of visually appealing masterpieces, including The Spider's Stratagem (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972) and 1900 (1976). Last Tango, which starred Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, has made Bertolucci a worldwide celebrity and acclaim, allowing it to recruit leading actors, including Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu and Burt Lancaster, for his epic film 300 minutes.

The last emperor, supported by British producer Jeremy Thomas, became Bertolucci's biggest hit, with filmmakers having the unprecedented permission to shoot in the Forbidden City of Beijing. After having achieved such success, Bertolucci stayed with Thomas, who went to do The Sheltering Sky, Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers. In this latest film, Bertolucci returned to the intoxicating mix of radical politics and eroticism with which he had made his mark decades before.

However, as part of the #MeToo campaign, a controversy erupted in 2016 regarding the consent of the actor Maria Schneider to the famous "butter" scene of Last Tango, after a three-year redone video in which Bertolucci acknowledged failed to fully inform him of the details of the proposed scene.

The last feature completed by Bertolucci was Me and You, adapted from a novel by Niccolò Ammaniti. Married since 1978 to filmmaker Clare Peploe, he has not had any children.