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Bernardo Bertolucci, whose epic "The Last Emperor" won nine Oscars and has influenced generations of filmmakers with other revolutionary works such as "The Conformist" and "Last Tango in Paris", in which he explores politics and sexuality through personal stories and a daring camera work, is dead. He was 77 years old.
His publicist, Flavia Schiavi, said Bertolucci had died Monday morning at his home in Rome. He was suffering from cancer.
Bertolucci, the greatest Italian author of his generation, has managed to work in both Europe and Hollywood, even though his relationship with the studios has had its ups and downs. But even when he operated in the studio system, Bertolucci still managed to make films considered projections of his inner world.
"The Last Emperor", an adaptation of the autobiography of the last imperial Chinese ruler, Pu Yi, swept the 1987 Oscars, winning all the categories in which he was nominated, including best film and best director. Thanks to this, Bertolucci became the first and only Italian to win the Oscar for best director. "The Last Emperor" is one of the most Oscar-winning films. It is also the first Western epic on China made with the cooperation of the Chinese government.
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Born on March 16, 1941 to a wealthy family in Parma, a city in northern Italy, Bertolucci was a prodigious talent from an early age. Son of the famous poet and writer Attilio Bertolucci, he himself won a poetry award at 21, then decided to become a filmmaker.
He began as an assistant to another Italian poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in Pasolini's first feature film titled "Accattone" in 1961, which represents a Roman pimp. Bertolucci's first film, "The Grim Reaper" in 1962, was an investigation into the murder of a Roman prostitute told from several points of view. The film was presented at the Venice Film Festival.
In 1970, he received his first Oscar nomination for the adapted scenario of "The Conformist", based on a novel by Alberto Moravia. The film takes place during the Italian fascist period and is centered on a tormented intellectual (Jean-Louis Trintignant) recruited by the secret police of Mussolini to go to Paris to assassinate an antifascist professor who was his teacher.
Cinematographically shot by director of photography Vittorio Storaro, "The Conformist" is now considered a masterpiece that has had a major influence on other filmmakers, especially the so-called New Hollywood directors, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.
Although considered one of the most important films of the twentieth century, "Tango" has aroused particular controversy because of its scene of anal rape, in which the butter is used as a lubricant. Bertolucci later admitted that the scene had been surprised by 19-year-old Schneider in order to elicit a genuine reaction from her "as a girl, not as an actress".
Before his death in 2011, Schneider had told an interviewer that she had "felt humiliated and … a little raped" by Brando and Bertolucci. But the director denied to have mistreated her.
"I think the success of" Last Tango "is partly due to scandal, sodomy, but, in truth, it's an extremely hopeless film," Bertolucci said. Variety in an interview of 2011. "It is very rare that such a desperate movie manages to have such a large audience."
"Last Tango" also brought Bertolucci into conflict with the law in his home country. He was raised for obscenity, which resulted in his losing his civil rights for five years. "I could not vote and that was the punitive part," he said. "I felt like I'm no longer Italian."
The political exile played a role in his choice to do what he called his "distant films" taking place in far-off places: "The Last Emperor" in China; "The Sheltering Sky" (1990), based on a novel by Paul Bowles, North Africa; and "Little Buddha" (1993) in Nepal and Bhutan.
Bertolucci's worldwide fame with "Last Tango" allowed him to stage his first Hollywood production, the bold historical epic "1900" in Italy. It is interpreted by Burt Lancaster – who was so eager to be in the film that, to avoid trouble with his agent, he worked for free – as well as by Donald Sutherland, the young Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu. They have acted alongside farmers in the region of Emilia, Italy, where the vast description of the social struggle is taking place.
The 1900 version of Bertolucci's director lasted five hours and 17 minutes, provoking a fierce battle against Paramount. The version published in the United States in 1977 was recorded at three hours and five minutes. The brawl and mixed critical reaction of the film almost ended Bertolucci's career.
But ten years later, in 1987, he returned to the United States when the Academy awarded nine Oscars to "The Last Emperor," a lavishly historic epic starring John Lone and Joan Chen. After years of unstable relationships with Hollywood, Bertolucci called his Oscar triumph "perhaps my most curious moment in Hollywood".
In 1996, Bertolucci shot her first film in Italy, "Stealing Beauty," in English, starring Liv Tyler, 19, as the main character of a tale of sexual initiation in Tuscany. He then followed the drama chamber shot in Rome "Besieged" in 1998 and Parisian "The Dreamers" in 2004, a paean in Paris from 1968 and the films he devoured then at his legendary Cinémathèque Française.
Bertolucci leaves behind his third wife, writer and director, Clare Peploe, with whom he married in 1979.
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