Bernardo Bertolucci

Director famed for Last Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor

Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian filmmaker whose sensual and visually stylistic movies ranged from intense chamber dramas to panoramic historical epics, died on Monday at his home in Rome. He was 77.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Clare Peploe, in a statement that did not specify the cause.

Bertolucci’s early work reflected the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular the shifting social and sexual mores of the times. While several of his films delved into the traumas of his country’s recent past, he fashioned himself as a global auteur.

Many of Bertolucci’s films were warmly embraced by Hollywood. The Last Emperor (1987), a lavish biopic of Pu Yi, who became the emperor of China at the age of three, won all nine Academy Awards for which it was nominated, including best picture and best director.

But Bertolucci’s best-known – and most controversial – film came earlier in his career: Last Tango in Paris (1972), an explicit depiction of the intense sexual relationship between a middle-aged American widower and a young Frenchwoman (played by Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider).

Last Tango received an X rating, landed on the covers of Time and Newsweek, and earned $36 million at the US box office alone. In Italy, the film was the subject of a protracted obscenity trial. In 1976, the Italian Supreme Court ordered all copies destroyed and handed Bertolucci a fourmonth suspended sentence.

Bernardo Bertolucci was born on 16 March, 1941, in Parma, Italy, into an affluent, artistically inclined family. His father, Attilio, was a renowned poet and occasional film critic; his mother, Ninetta, taught literature. As a teenager, after the family had moved to Rome, he started making short films with a borrowed 16mm camera.

At 20, Bertolucci dropped out of the University of Rome when the opportunity arose to assist a neighbour and family friend, Pier Paolo Pasolini, on the set of Pasolini’s first feature, Accattone (1961).

Despite early success as a poet – a collection of his poetry won the prestigious Viareggio Prize in 1962 – Bertolucci chose to devote himself to cinema. Expanded from a story treatment by Pasolini, his directing debut, The Grim Reaper, about the murder of a prostitute in a Roman park, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1962.

If his first feature carried inevitable shades of Pasolini, Bertolucci came into his own with his second, Before the Revolution (1964). Loosely based on the Stendhal novel The Charterhouse of Parma, it describes the struggle of a young man torn between his bourgeois background and his radical aspirations.

Even more than Pasolini, Jean-luc Godard was an important early influence. Godard looms large over Bertolucci’s third – and most experimental – feature, Partner (1968), a reworking of Dostoevsky’s Double, in which a young man encounters his revolutionary doppelgänger.

In The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), adapted from a Borges story, a young man investigates the death of his father, a resistance leader. Through formal devices – the same actors appear in both past and present-day sequences – the film creates a disorientingly fluid sense of time and underscores the persistence of history.

Using an even more intricate flashback structure, The Conformist (1970), set during the Mussolini era, connects the fascist mindset with repressed sexuality. The protagonist (Jean-louis Trintignant) is a closeted man who, in his desperate bid for normalcy, marries, joins the Fascist Party and agrees to assassinate a former professor.

A lifelong leftist and a member of the Italian Communist Party in his 20s and 30s, Bertolucci began to question the viability of political filmmaking as his work grew more popular. “You cannot make political films in a commercial situation,” he said in an interview with the New York Times in 1973. “The more revolutionary the film, the less the public would accept it.”

The success of The Conformist and Last Tango allowed Bertolucci to embark on his most ambitious film, 1900, a multi-generational family saga about the class struggle with a large international cast including Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Burt Lancaster, Donald Sutherland and Dominique Sanda.

Tracing the entwined destinies of two men born on the same day at the dawn of the 20th century – one a peasant, the other an aristocrat – the film follows its characters through decades of Italian political and social upheavals.

Capitalising on the vogue for historical prestige pictures, Bertolucci shifted back into epic mode with The Last Emperor, the first Western feature granted permission to film within the Forbidden City in Beijing.

Bertolucci’s next two films came to be bracketed with The Last Emperor as his “Eastern trilogy.” (All three were cowritten with screenwriter Mark Peploe, his brother-inlaw.) The Sheltering Sky (1990) was based on a Paul Bowles novel about Americans adrift in North Africa. Little Buddha (1993) told the dual stories of the life of Siddhartha and of a US boy who may be the reincarnation of a Buddhist lama.

Slowed by poor health and back problems, Bertolucci directed his final film, Me and You (2012), from a wheelchair. Another intimate drama, it revolved around a troubled adolescent hiding out in a basement with his half-sister. DENNIS LIM New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service.