Monica Vitti, multifaceted actress who symbolized Italian mystique, dies at 90

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Monica Vitti in 1964.

Monica Vitti, an Italian actress who secured an enduring place in art house drama as the muse of Michelangelo Antonioni for his 1960s films about existential dread before redefining herself as a vibrant comedian, died Feb. 2 in Rome. She was 90.

Walter Veltroni, an author, filmmaker and former mayor of Rome, confirmed the death. Once a symbol of Italian mystique, ever-present on-screen and on fashion magazine covers, she had been absent from public view for nearly 20 years, reportedly suffering from a degenerative condition similar to Alzheimer’s disease.

Ms. Vitti was a classically trained but obscure comedic stage actress before Antonioni became her companion, stage director and cinematic Svengali in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Her willowy physique, husky voice, full lips and mane of sun-kissed blond hair gave her a raw sensual appeal. But Antonioni cast her against type in a cycle of acclaimed films about emotional detachment and spiritual barrenness. He made her the personification of glamorous malaise — and an international star.

“She certainly inspires me,” Antonioni told an interviewer at the time, “but the parts I give her are a long way from her own character. Monica c’est la joie de vivre.”

Their first movie collaboration was “L’Avventura” (“The Adventure,” 1960), in which Ms. Vitti portrayed a young woman who drifts in and out of a relationship with the fiance of her missing friend. The woman who has vanished becomes irrelevant, as does all else for the two searchers. They are cool ciphers, pleasure-seeking but joyless, wandering into a metaphysical abyss more than searching for meaning.

The film won a special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was also booed. Many critics, among them Pauline Kael, came to its defense (“There is something great here,” she wrote, “a new mood, a new emotional rhythm”). At the box office, it exceeded expectations for a film that struck some audiences as indecipherable.

Ms. Vitti repeated variations on her depiction of despair and loneliness in subsequent Antonioni films, film-festival darlings in which plot was secondary to maintaining an unsettled mood of degradation, even dehumanization.

[Michelangelo Antonioni, Italian filmmaker who chronicled isolation and betrayal, dies at 94]

“Each time I have tried to communicate with someone, love has disappeared,” Ms. Vitti says as a bored society flirt in “La Notte” (“The Night,” 1961) with Marcello Mastroianni. She also starred in “L’Eclisse” (“The Eclipse,” 1962) with Alain Delon and “Il Deserto Rosso” (“Red Desert,” 1964) opposite Richard Harris.

By that final work, Ms. Vitti said, she began to chafe under Antonioni’s “private and hidden” personality and the dominance of his artistic reputation.

“In 1964,” she told the New York Times, “Michelangelo was ‘the great Antonioni.’ I felt like the greenest of actresses. I was terrorized, afraid that I could not make my way by myself. I had refused everyone in order to work and live with Michelangelo. And because I was too identified with him, other directors, like Fellini, would not use me. After the breakup I had no important director or backer. I was alone. Yet I did not want to work with imitators of the Antonioni style.”

Increasingly eager to showcase a range beyond ennui — and with the encouragement of her soon-to-be romantic partner, cinematographer Carlo Di Palma — she appeared with comic actor Alberto Sordi in “Il Disco Volante” (“The Flying Saucer,” 1964), played a miniskirted hitchhiker in the sex-comedy portmanteau “The Queens” (1966) and made her English-language debut in “Modesty Blaise” (1966), a spy caper based on a comic strip.

Released amid the James Bond phenomenon, “Modesty Blaise” was intended to build Ms. Vitti into a major star in England and the United States, but the film was a critical and commercial misfire. It retained a following over the decades, however, with its confident female lead and campy mod fashion.

Girolamo Di Majo

AP

Ms. Vitti and Italian movie director Michelangelo Antonioni in 1963.

Ms. Vitti regrouped and returned to her comedic roots, throwing herself into ribald and unpretentious films that won her a devoted Italian fan base.

Her best-known movies included “La Ragazza Con la Pistola” (“The Girl With the Pistol,” 1968), a sendup of Sicilian honor killings; “Amore Mio Aiutami” (“Help Me, My Love,” 1969), about a woman who confesses to infidelity and her husband’s attempts to process it; “La Tosca,” (1973), which put a farcical spin on Puccini’s opera; and “Polvere di Stelle” (“Stardust,” 1973), about a third-rate troupe of entertainers in World War II.

She also appeared in Luis Buñuel’s surreal comedy “Le Fantôme de la Liberté” (“The Phantom of Liberty,” 1974) and won ecstatic reviews for “An Almost Perfect Affair” (1979), a comic romance directed by Michael Ritchie and set at the Cannes Film Festival. She played an Italian producer’s sophisticated but bored wife who embarks on a fling with an earnest, low-budget American filmmaker (Keith Carradine).

“The revelation of the film is that the throaty, glamorous Vitti is a marvelous comedian . . . bubbling with earthy, sensuous mischief and infectious high spirits,” wrote Newsweek movie critic David Ansen, who, like most American filmgoers, had rarely been exposed to her work beyond the Antonioni pictures.

“It’s an ambition of mine, something I really enjoy — making people laugh,” Ms. Vitti once told an interviewer. “There’s this thing in Italy, every so often people say, ‘But why?’ When I made films with Antonioni about alienation — which I’m very happy to have done — they would say, ‘Ah, alienation. It’s too distant, too difficult, the audience won’t understand.’

“Then I would try to do what I did in the theater, try to make people laugh,” she continued. “And then they would say, ‘You’re abandoning high art cinema and reducing yourself to these kinds of films.’ What do you mean ‘reduce’ myself? I don’t know — I think it’s a really serious task. Making people laugh is difficult but also beautiful.”

Ms. Vitti (the surname was a variation on her mother’s maiden name, Vittiglia) was born Maria Luisa Ceciarelli in Rome on Nov. 3, 1931. She said her father was a civil servant and recalled a strict and unpleasant childhood from which she sought escape through acting.

After graduating in 1953 from the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome, she appeared onstage and had small roles in movie comedies before Antonioni found himself bewitched as she dubbed a voice for his film “Il Grido” (“The Cry,” 1957).

“You have a beautiful neck,” he reputedly told her. “You could be in the movies.” They soon became inseparable, romantically and artistically. After a long absence, she reunited with Antonioni for the dismally received “Il Mistero di Oberwald” (“The Mystery of Oberwald,” 1980). He died in 2007.

She spent 27 years living with Roberto Russo, a cinematographer and director, before they married in 2000. (Recalling her scarring upbringing, she had long delayed marriage, calling the institution an “ill-conceived proposition.”) A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

Staff

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Spanish director Luis Bunuel, on left, talks to French actor Jean-Claude Brialy and Ms. Vitti on the stage of his 1974 film “The Phantom of Liberty.”

Ms. Vitti directed, co-wrote and starred in a wan feature film, the drama “Scandalo Segreto” (“Secret Scandal,” 1990), before largely retiring. She received a lifetime achievement honor from the Venice Film Festival in 1995, and she wrote a top-selling memoir, “Il Letto è Una Rosa” (“A Bed Is Like a Rose”), that ruminated on the sensuality and sexuality that long defined her persona.

“When you’re in bed wonderful things happen — and terrible things too,” she observed. “It’s a place of love, or a place where you are abandoned; a place where you talk to your lover, or a place where you argue; a place where you love or hate, laugh and cry, a place where you remember some things and forget others, a place where couples pledge eternal love and also betray each other.”

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Source: WP