Marcello Mastroianni

Born Sept. 28, 1923, in Fontana Liri, near Frosinone. Italian film actor.

Mastroianni first was a worker and began his acting career in amateur theatricals. The director L. Visconti later invited him to join his drama company. Mastroianni’s first major film role was Ercole in Sunday in August (1949). In the 1950’s he appeared mainly in comedy films, such as Girls of the Spanish Steps (1951), Giorni d’Amore (Days of Love, 1954), and Un Ettaro di Cielo (A Hectare of Sky, 1959). One of his first important roles was Ugo in the antifascist film Cronaca di Poveri Amanti (A Tale of Impoverished Lovers, 1953). In the film White Nights, based on a work by Dostoevsky, he played the Dreamer.

Mastroianni acted in films directed by F. Fellini (Marcello in La Dolce Vita, 1959; Guido Anselmi in 8½, 1962) and M. Antonioni (Giovanni in La Notte, 1960); in these films he portrayed contemporary Western intellectuals—a journalist, a film director, and a writer—who cannot find a place for themselves in the cruel and merciless bourgeois world but, weak-willed and passive, submit to its laws. In the film The Organizer (1963), Mastroianni gave a realistic and convincing portrayal of a socialist schoolteacher who organizes one of the first strikes of the Italian working class. He won acclaim for his performances in the comedies of manners Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963) and Marriage Italian Style (1964), and in director P. Germi’s comical social satire Divorce Italian Style (1961). In Sunflower (1971), Mastroianni played Antonio, an Italian prisoner of war who finds a second homeland in the USSR.