With a smile that could be both boyish and world-weary, Marcello Mastroianni became the face of modern Italy on screen, the man who walked through Fellini’s Rome as if the city itself were dreaming.
Marcello Mastroianni was born on 26 September 1924 in Fontana Liri, in the Lazio region of Italy. Some sources give 28 September, which appears to be the date his birth was registered. He grew up in Rome, where he studied and began acting on stage, and he came to film in the years after the Second World War, working in a cinema that was rediscovering Italy itself.
His breakthrough came with Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), and then, decisively, with Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), in which he played Marcello Rubini, a journalist drifting through Rome’s glamorous nights. The role made him an international star, and his collaboration with Fellini continued with 8½ (1963), in which he played the blocked film director Guido Anselmi. In both films Mastroianni is not a hero in the old sense, but a man watching his own life, amused, melancholy and endlessly human.
Across the 1960s he worked with the great directors of Italian cinema, and with Sophia Loren in films including Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) and Marriage Italian Style (1964), partnerships that became part of Italy’s cultural identity. Later work included A Special Day (1977), opposite Loren, and films with Fellini in the 1980s, including Ginger and Fred (1986). Mastroianni died in Paris on 19 December 1996, at the age of 72. He left behind a gallery of gentlemen, dreamers and ordinary men, each played with the same quiet elegance, as if Rome itself were smiling through him.