Marcello Mastroianni

Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni (28 September 1924 – 19 December 1996) was an Italian film actor, regarded as one of his country's most iconic male performers of the 20th century.

He played leading roles for many of Italy's top directors in a career spanning 147 films between 1939 and 1997, and garnered many international honours including two BAFTA Awards, two Best Actor awards at the Venice and Cannes film festivals, two Golden Globes, and three Academy Award nominations.

Born in the province of Frosinone and raised in Turin and Rome, Mastroianni made his film debut in 1939 at the age of 14, but did not seriously pursue acting until the 1950s, when he made his critical and commercial breakthrough in the caper comedy Big Deal on Madonna Street (1959).

Mastroianni made his screen debut as an uncredited extra in Marionette (1939) when he was fourteen, and made intermittent minor film appearances until landing his first big role in Atto d'accusa (1951).

Mastroianni married Flora Carabella on 12 August 1950.

They had one daughter together, Barbara (1951–2018), and informally separated in 1964 because of his affairs with younger women.

Excelling in both dramatic and comedic roles, he formed a notable on-screen duo with actress and sex symbol Sophia Loren, co-starring with her in eight films between 1954 and 1994.

Despite international acclaim, Mastroianni largely shunned Hollywood, and remained a quintessentially Italian thespian for the majority of his career.

His other prominent films include Days of Love (1954) with Marina Vlady; La Notte (1961) with Jeanne Moreau; Too Bad She's Bad (1954), Lucky to Be a Woman (1956), Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963), Marriage Italian Style (1964), Sunflower (1970), The Priest's Wife (1971), A Special Day (1977) and Robert Altman's Prêt-à-Porter (1994) – all co-starring Sophia Loren; Luchino Visconti's White Nights (1957); Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style (1961); Family Diary (1962) with Jacques Perrin; A Very Private Affair (1962) with Brigitte Bardot; Mario Monicelli's Casanova 70 (1965); Diamonds for Breakfast (1968) with Rita Tushingham; The Pizza Triangle (1970) with Monica Vitti; Massacre in Rome (1973) with Richard Burton; The Sunday Woman (1975) with Jacqueline Bisset; Stay As You Are (1978) with Nastassja Kinski; Fellini's City of Women (1980) and Ginger and Fred (1986); Marco Bellocchio's Henry IV (1984); Macaroni (1985) with Jack Lemmon; Nikita Mikhalkov's Dark Eyes (1987) with Marthe Keller; Giuseppe Tornatore's Everybody's Fine (1990); Used People (1992) with Shirley MacLaine; and Agnès Varda's One Hundred and One Nights (1995).

He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor three times: for Divorce Italian Style, A Special Day and Dark Eyes.

Mastroianni, Dean Stockwell and Jack Lemmon are the only actors to have been twice awarded the Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival.

Within a decade he became a major international celebrity, starring in Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958); and in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) playing a disillusioned and self-loathing tabloid columnist who spends his days and nights exploring Rome's decadent high society.

He became an international celebrity through his collaborations with director Federico Fellini, first as a disillusioned tabloid columnist in La Dolce Vita (1960), then as a creatively-stifled filmmaker in 8½ (1963).

Nonetheless, he was the first actor to receive an Academy Award nomination for a non-English language performance, and was nominated for Best Actor three times – Divorce Italian Style (1961), A Special Day (1977), and Dark Eyes (1987).

He was one of only three actors, the others being Jack Lemmon and Dean Stockwell, to win the prestigious Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor twice.

Mastroianni's contributions to Italian art and culture saw him receive multiple civil honours, including the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, the highest-ranking knighthood of the country.

Mastroianni was born in Fontana Liri, a small village in the Apennines within the Lazio province of Frosinone, and grew up in Turin and Rome.

He was the son of Ida (née Irolle) and Ottone Mastroianni.

Both of his parents were from the nearby town of Arpino.

His father ran a carpentry shop.

Mastroianni was a nephew of sculptor Umberto Mastroianni.

During World War II, after the division into Axis and Allied Italy, he was interned in a loosely guarded German prison camp, from which he escaped to hide in Venice.

Mastroianni followed La Dolce Vita with another signature role, that of a film director who, amidst self-doubt and troubled love affairs, finds himself in a creative block while making a film in Fellini's 8½ (1963).

Mastroianni's first serious relationship after the separation was with Faye Dunaway, his co-star in A Place for Lovers (1968).

Dunaway wanted to marry and have children, but Mastroianni, a Catholic, refused to divorce Carabella.

Mastroianni won it in 1970 for The Pizza Triangle and in 1987 for Dark Eyes.

In 1970, after more than two years of waiting for Mastroianni to change his mind, Dunaway left him.

His brother Ruggero Mastroianni was a film editor who worked on some of Marcello's films (City of Women, Ginger and Fred), and appeared alongside Marcello in Scipione detto anche l'Africano, a spoof of the once popular Sword and Sandal film genre released in 1971.

During that time, the couple made four films together: It Only Happens to Others (1971), La cagna (1972), A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973) and Don't Touch the White Woman! (1974).

After Mastroianni and Deneuve broke up, Carabella reportedly offered to adopt Chiara because her parents' busy careers kept them away so often.

Deneuve would have none of it.

Mastroianni's other lovers reportedly included actresses Anouk Aimée, Carole Mallory, Claudia Cardinale, Lauren Hutton and Ursula Andress.

Mastroianni had a daughter, Chiara Mastroianni (born 28 May 1972), with French actress Catherine Deneuve, who was nearly 20 years his junior and lived with him for four years in the 1970s.

Mastroianni told a reporter for People magazine in 1987 that he never got over the breakup.

"She was the woman I loved the most," he said.

"I'll always be sorry to have lost her. I was whole with her for the first time in my life."

In her 1995 autobiography Looking for Gatsby, Dunaway wrote: "I wish to this day it had worked out."

Mastroianni starred alongside his daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, in Raúl Ruiz's Three Lives and Only One Death in 1996.

For this performance he won the Silver Wave Award at the Ft. Lauderdale International Film Festival.

His final film, Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997), was released posthumously.