In A Special Day (1977), Marcello Mastroianni played Gabriele, a homosexual former radio announcer who, on the day of a great Fascist rally in Rome in 1938, meets Antonietta, a housewife played by Sophia Loren, in their nearly empty apartment building. Directed by Ettore Scola, the film is a quiet, humane portrait of two outsiders finding each other for a single day.
Gabriele is gentle, witty and doomed by the regime around him, and Mastroianni plays him with a tenderness that never becomes sentimentality. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Mastroianni was nominated for Best Actor. It is one of his finest late performances, a reminder that his greatest gift was for listening, and for making another person’s loneliness visible.