In a quiet apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, on the night of 19 December 1996, Marcello Mastroianni died of pancreatic cancer at the age of seventy-two. Around his bed were the people who had mattered most in his life: his two daughters, Barbara and Chiara, and the two women who had loved him longest, Catherine Deneuve and Anna Maria Tatò. Far away in Rome, the Trevi Fountain was switched off and draped in black. It was an extraordinary tribute for an ordinary man who had spent nearly forty years insisting, gently and stubbornly, that he was not a star at all.
A Boy from Fontana Liri
Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni was born in September 1924 in Fontana Liri, a small village in the Apennine hills of Lazio, between Rome and Naples. Modern sources give the day as 26 September; older records say 28 September, which appears to be the date his birth was registered. He was the son of Ida Irolle and Ottone Mastroianni, who ran a carpentry shop, and he grew up in a household where work was done with the hands. His father and grandfather were carpenters, and the young Marcello absorbed a craftsman’s sense of modesty that would stay with him for the rest of his life. He was the nephew of the sculptor Umberto Mastroianni, and his younger brother Ruggero would grow up to become a film editor.
The family moved as work demanded, first to Turin and then to Rome, and it was in those two cities that Marcello spent his childhood and youth. He was not a child of privilege or of the theatre; he was a working-class boy from a small town who happened to have a handsome face and a gift he did not yet know he possessed. His film debut came almost by accident, when at the age of fourteen he appeared as an uncredited extra in the 1939 film Marionette. It was a small thing, and nothing about it suggested the boy would one day become the face of Italian cinema.
The War That Stole His Youth
Mastroianni was still a young man when the Second World War tore Italy apart. After the armistice of September 1943 divided the country between Axis and Allied Italy, he was interned in a loosely guarded German prison camp. He slipped away from the loosely guarded camp and made his way to Venice, where he hid until the war ended. It was a young man’s survival, quiet and unglamorous, and it left its mark on him.
The war gave him the quality that would define his acting — a certain melancholy, a sense that his characters had seen things they could not quite put into words. When he played men who were lost, or tired, or quietly disappointed, he was not inventing the feeling. He had learned it young, in a country that was hungry and wounded and trying to reinvent itself. After the war he enrolled at the University of Rome, and it was there, in amateur theatricals, that he began to act in earnest.
The Stage, and a Shyness That Never Left
Mastroianni did not pursue acting seriously until the 1950s, when he began working on the stage in Rome and taking small parts in films. The theatre gave him a craft and a discipline, and it also gave him a place to hide: on stage, he was a character, not himself. Off stage, he was shy and soft-spoken, a man who listened more than he spoke and seemed faintly embarrassed by his own good looks.
That shyness never left him, even at the height of his fame. He was the opposite of the swaggering movie star. He did not collect admirers or court the press, and he treated interviews as a mild ordeal to be endured with politeness. What he loved was the work itself — the rehearsal, the set, the company of other actors — and he loved it in the way a carpenter loves a workshop: as a place where a job is done well, without fuss. He worked constantly, in film after film, and he brought the same unshowy professionalism to a small part that he brought to a leading role. The modesty was not an act. It was the boy from Fontana Liri, still wondering what all the fuss was about.
The Reluctant Latin Lover
When the world discovered Mastroianni, it decided he was the Latin Lover, the archetypal romantic Italian, and the label followed him for the rest of his life. It baffled him. In a 1987 interview with Time Out magazine, he protested the idea with genuine bewilderment. He said he was never really somebody like Clark Gable or John Wayne, and that he was always a little confused in front of a woman. He asked why anyone called him a Latin Lover, because looking at his films, he had never played a strong man who catches a woman; his men were always fragile in some way. It was a revealing remark, because it was true: his great characters are not conquerors but dreamers, husbands, and drifters, men who are charmed and confused by women rather than masters of them.
He also resisted the machine that makes stars. Despite his international fame, he largely shunned Hollywood, and he turned down the path that would have made him a fixture of American cinema. The Hollywood scripts sent to him, as his biographer Donald Dewey noted, almost always called for him to be a Latin lover, and he had no interest in playing a caricature of himself for the rest of his life. He preferred to remain an Italian actor working with Italian directors, in Italian stories, even if it meant smaller pay and less glamour. He never directed a film either; asked once whether he had considered it, he laughed the idea off, saying a director must convince everybody, and that it was not for him. He was content to be the man in front of the camera, doing his job and going home.
Flora: The Wife Who Waited
In 1950, when his career was only beginning, Mastroianni married the actress Flora Carabella, the daughter of a composer and a graduate of the drama school in Rome. She had taken him under her wing from the moment they met, and she believed in him before the world did. In 1951 they had a daughter, Barbara, who would grow up to become a costume designer. For a time they were a young couple building a life together, and then fame arrived, and the marriage began to come apart. They separated in 1964, but they never divorced. Legally, Flora remained his wife for forty-six years, until the day he died.
Flora never filed for divorce despite his well-known romantic relationships, and Mastroianni never pressed for one either, even when he wanted it most. He sent her flowers on every wedding anniversary, year after year, a small ritual of fidelity from a man who had been unfaithful in almost every other way. In 1976, Flora even offered to adopt Chiara, his daughter by Catherine Deneuve, because both of the child’s parents were so often away working — an offer Deneuve declined, but one that said everything about Flora’s generosity. She outlived her husband by three years, dying of cancer in 1999, and their marriage remained formally unbroken to the end.
Catherine: The Love He Could Not Keep
The great love of Mastroianni’s life came late. He met the French actress Catherine Deneuve on the set of the film Liza in 1972, and their relationship lasted four years. For the first time in his life, he wanted stability; he wanted to marry, and he was prepared to ask Flora for a divorce. But Deneuve, who had seen what marriage had done to others, refused him. She had declared that she would never marry again, and no proposal, however sincere, could change her mind. It was a wound he carried quietly for the rest of his life.
Their daughter, Chiara Françoise Charlotte Mastroianni, was born in Paris on 28 May 1972, and she would grow up to become an actress and singer in her own right. Her parents separated in 1974, when she was only two years old, and she later said she had no memory of them as a couple — she had never even seen them kiss except in the movies. Yet the bond survived the end of their romance. She was at his bedside when he died, the one woman he had truly wanted to keep. Before Deneuve, there had been a long relationship with the American actress Faye Dunaway, from 1968 to 1971, but it was Deneuve who changed him: she was the woman for whom the shy romantic finally wanted to be a husband, and the one who taught him that some doors, once closed, do not open again.
Anna Maria and the Paris Years
From 1976 until his death, Mastroianni’s companion was the film director Anna Maria Tatò. She was his last love, and she shared his final two decades, living with him in Paris as his health began to fail. Tatò would later direct Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember, the documentary released in 1997 in which Mastroianni, filmed in 1996, talks about his life as an actor with the frankness of a man who knows his time is short. In it he is diffident about prizes, modest about his looks, and warm about the people he worked with. He speaks of his father and grandfather, the carpenters, and of his mother, and of a life spent working.
He worked almost until the end. His final films included Three Lives and Only One Death in 1996, in which he appeared alongside his daughter Chiara, and Manoel de Oliveira’s Voyage to the Beginning of the World, released after his death in 1997. He was already ill with pancreatic cancer, but he kept working, because work was what he had always done. His younger brother Ruggero, the film editor, had died in September 1996, only three months before him. Marcello went on acting, quietly, until his body would no longer allow it.
The Night the Fountain Went Dark
When Mastroianni died in Paris on 19 December 1996, Rome mourned him as one of its own. A funeral was held at the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris on 20 December, and then his remains were brought home to Rome, where a second ceremony took place at the city hall before he was buried in his family vault in the Verano Cemetery. And in the city that had made him famous, the Trevi Fountain was turned off and draped in black — a tribute to the man who had waded through its waters on a cold winter night thirty-six years earlier and made the whole world fall in love with Rome.
It was the perfect farewell for a man who had never wanted to be a star, because it was not about stardom at all. It was about a city remembering one of its sons. Mastroianni left behind some 147 films, three Academy Award nominations, two Best Actor awards at Cannes, and a gallery of gentlemen, dreamers, and ordinary men, each played with the same quiet elegance. But he also left behind something rarer: the example of a famous man who stayed modest, a romantic hero who was shy in real life, and a star who never believed his own legend. The fountain was switched back on eventually, and the water flowed again — but for one night, Rome stood still in the dark, remembering the shy boy from Fontana Liri who had made the whole world dream.