ITALIAN actor Marcello Mastroianni, one of the most enduring screen symbols of the Latin Lover, died yesterday at his Paris home at the age of 72.
The actor's agent in Rome confirmed the death, first reported on French radio. "The news unfortunately is true," said a weeping Giovanna Cau, who has represented the actor for 40 years. Mastroianni, who won worldwide recognition in the early 1960s for his comic performance in Divorce Italian Style, reportedly suffered from pancreatic cancer.
Italian television reported that Mastroianni's former companion, the French actress Catherine Deneuve, was at his bedside when he died, along with their 24 year old daughter, the actress Chiara Mastroianni. Mastroianni's daughter Barbara, by his wife Flora, was also with him.
Ironic, understated and always modest, Mastroianni insisted he was uncomfortable with his screen image, and he once said on American television "I am not a sex addict." He told interviewers that director Federico Fellini hired him for La Dolce Vita because he had a "terribly ordinary face".
Since his screen debut in 1947, Mastroianni starred in more than 120 films, won two best actor awards at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar. He played alongside Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren, Yves Montand and Jack Lemmon in performances with top Italian directors.
Mastroianni was born on September 18th, 1924, in a small town near Rome. As a child, he had a sampling of stage roles at his parish church. His father, a carpenter, forced him to abandon his formal schooling at 14 and go to work.
In the late 1930s Mastroianni held odd jobs in Rome, occasionally getting small parts in movies. During the second World War while he was working as a draughtsman, German soldiers carted him to a labour camp in northern Italy.
But he escaped, and lived in wartime poverty in Venice until 1945. After the war he returned to Rome and worked as a clerk with a British film distribution company during the day and practised acting in the evening with a group of university students.
Mastroianni's first lead film role was in an Italian production of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables in 1947. Fellini cast him as a womanising journalist in La Do/cc Vita, one of his most famous roles. The movie was the beginning of a partnership with the director that brought him lead roles in 81/2 (1963) in which he co-starred with Anouk Aimee as a movie director dreaming of his ideal woman City Of Women (1979), and Ginger And Fred (1985) which cast him as an elderly tap dancer remembering his youth.
MASTROIANNI formed a winning screen partnership with Sophia Loren, Co-starring with her in 10 films in which they came to symbolise the common Italian man and woman married or in love. Their first success together was in Marriage Italian Style (1964), followed by Sunflowers (1969), The Priest's Wife (1970) and A Special Day (1977).
He reunited on the screen with Loren in Robert Altman's 1994 satirical comedy on the fashion industry, Pret-d-porter. In 1993, he appeared with Shirley MacLaine, Jessica Tandy and Kathy Baker in Used People. He was nominated for an Oscar for his role in A Special Day, in which he was cast as a homosexual trying to survive in Fascist Italy, a part that defied his "Latin Lover" reputation. He married actress Flora Carabella in 1950. In 1972, he created a media scandal by leaving her to live with Deneuve. They separated a few years later.
The brooding, impassive features of Marcello Mastroianni graced dozens of films in a prolific career that spanned 50 years. A screen presence, performed with an apparent ease and even effortlessness. However as he became more and more in demand and his work rate soared, the actor appeared to be merely going through the motions on automatic pilot in some of his movies.
Nevertheless, Marccllo Mastroianni was one of the great Italian actors of the century. He had been working in cinema for 12 Years before he made his first major international impact as the gossip columnist who has ambitions towards being a serious writer and tries to find himself in decadent Italian society in the 1260 Fellini classic, La Dolce Vita. Three years later he gave one of the outstanding performances of his career as the film director coping with professional and personal problems in Fellini's brilliant 8 1/2.
Over the next 30 years Mastroianni distinguished himself in a range of roles, of which the most memorable include that of the well meaning aristocrat in Notting Hill in one of his few English language features, John Boorman's Leo The Last (1970). He also courageously played one of the four disillusioned middle aged men who set out to cat themselves to death in Marco Ferreri's provocative La Grande Bouffe (1973). Other remarkable performances include that of the lonely gay broadcaster in Ettore Scola's poignant A Special Day (19.77) gloriously teamed with Giulietta Masina as veteran cabaret performers in Fellini's Ginger And Fred (1985), and his truly unforgettable portrayal of the successful Roman lawyer going through an awkward and embarrassing reunion with his son in Scola's neglected What Time Is It?
