Tribute to Marcello Mastroianni

Wally Hammond looks back at the career of one of Italy‘s greatest screen actors as the Ciné Lumière pays tribute to Marcello Mastroianni

The Ciné Lumière’s dozen-film season offers a good opportunity to reassess – and celebrate – the style, impact and character of the multi-faceted Italian screen actor, Marcello Mastroianni.

He hasn’t many challengers for being the most nationally and internationally popular Italian actor of all time, but was he the greatest? And if so, what was special about him?

As a screen thespian, he had the tenacity, longevity and productivity that are useful, if not necessary, requirements of a great actor. Born in 1924 and active in the cinema from 1948, Mastroianni had packed under his laudably unexpanded belt some 140 screen appearances by the time he completed his last role in 1997. Dying of pancreatic cancer, he movingly played the wandering, grey-haired, alter ego of the then 88-year-old Portuguese director, Manoel de Oliveira.

It was a long road from his days acting in Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams plays for Luchino Visconti’s theatre company in the late ’40s. He built up the versatility and global recognition that eventually attracted him to an unrivalled list of directors, ranging from Visconti, Fellini and Antonioni to Liliana Cavani, Marco Ferreri, Angelopoulos, Polanski, the Tavianis and Raoul Ruiz.

Even by 1960, the year the season begins, Mastroianni had been on the road for 50 films. His fanbase was huge but still domestic. The release of Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita’, followed by Antonioni’s ‘La Notte’, changed all that, kick-starting an array of bemusing international appellations – ‘the quintessential Latin lover’, ‘the space-age Valentino’, ‘the Italian Gregory Peck’ – that spoke well of his charm and good, dark, Italian looks but belied his essential appeal.

Mastroianni, talking of Fellini in 1995, made clear that his mentor wasn’t looking for an elegant dreamboat: ‘He told me he wanted to make a film with Paul Newman. So as not to steal the limelight from the American actor, he needed some ordinary-looking guy to play alongside him.’

That may be a joke – Fellini’s awareness of Mastroianni’s remarkable appeal to women is not in doubt – but it points to something deeper and more complex in Mastroianni’s inimitable screen presence: how the actor could show contradictions – illusions, weaknesses or hypocrisies – in male characters without losing sympathy.

That’s why, of the pair of crisis-ridden ‘intellectuals’ he essayed in ‘La Dolce Vita’ (Apr 13) and ‘La Notte’ (Apr 20 & 22), his little-boy-lost journalist Marcello in the former is more moving than his introspective writer Giovanni in the latter. In Pietro Germi’s 1961 film, ‘Divorce Italian Style’ (Apr 11), in which, hilariously, Mastroianni sports a smaller moustache than his undivorceable wife, Rosalia, Mastroianni not only showed his competence with the games of the commedia all’italiana, but the beginnings of a genius in inhabiting Italian stereotypes and an increasing postmodern ability to parody them.

You can see that in Fellini’s ‘8½’ (Apr 15 & 18) – where his trademark persona of bewilderment, frustration and ennui as filmmaker Fellini’s alter ego is itself becalmed in the circus of passing faces. It’s nice, too, to think John Boorman had his criminal aristo in ‘Divorce…’ in mind when he cast him, in 1970, as the exiled prince for the Notting Hill set, ‘Leo the Last’ (Apr 16, 19 & 23); just as his earlier moral dissolution deepens its lampooning in the sordid 1973 bacchanalia, ‘Blow Out’ (Sun & Apr 15).

These, and a couple of added rarities, can only offer tantalising glimpses of Mastroianni’s long screen journey from the priapic to the satiated, from fun, energy and early vigour to final pathos, but they do intimate a unique, rich contribution to cinema acting.

As a bonus, it is hoped his daughter with Catherine Deneuve, actress Chiara Mastroianni, will be on hand before the introduction to the evening screening on April 11 to discuss her father’s irreplaceable screen career.

The Mastroianni season is at Ciné Lumière from Apr 6-24.