Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci dies, aged 77

ROME: Legendary Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci (photo above), whose films include “Last Tango In Paris” and “1900”, died on Monday aged 77.

Bertolucci died at his home in Rome early on Monday, his press office Punto e Virgola said in an email.

Considered one of the giants of Italian and world cinema, Bertolucci was the only Italian ever to win the Oscar for best film, snapping up the award in 1988 for “The Last Emperor.”

The biographical masterpiece about the last Chinese emperor won a total of nine Oscars, all of those for which it was nominated.

He had been wheelchair-bound for several years and won an honorary Palme d’Or for his life’s work at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

Former festival president Gilles Jacob said he was saddened by the death of “the last emperor of Italian cinema, the lord of all epics and all escapades.”

“The party is over: it takes two to tango,” Jacob told AFP.

Born in Parma, northeastern Italy, on March 16, 1941, Bertolucci made films that were often highly politicised, dealing with workers’ struggles in “1900” or the fate of left-wingers in fascist Italy in “The Conformist”.

His father, a poet, history lecturer and cinema critic, gave him his first 16mm camera aged 15.

Bertolucci studied literature before turning to film, meeting Pier Paolo Pasolini as his assistant director on “Accattone” in 1961.

He co-wrote the 1968 spaghetti Western classic “Once Upon a Time in the West” along with Dario Argento and director Sergio Leone.

A member of the Italian Communist party, Bertolucci made the epic “1900” about the class struggle between Italian peasants and aristocrats spanning almost a century and starring Robert De Niro, Burt Lancaster and Gerard Depardieu.

When asked in 2013 how he would like to be remembered, Bertolucci told AFP: “I don’t care.”

“I think my movies are there, people can see them,” he said at a presentation of a 3D version of “The Last Emperor” to mark the 25th anniversary of its international release.

“And sometimes I laugh, thinking I will be remembered more as a talent scout of young girls than as a film director,” he said. — AFP