Italian film star with a surprising talent for comedy
One of the “shining stars of postwar Italian cinema”, Monica Vitti, who has died aged 90, was known for her personal and professional association with the modernist director Michelangelo Antonioni, said Alexander Larman in The Daily Telegraph. They made a trio of films together in the early
1960s – L’Avventura (The Adventure), La
Notte (The Night) and L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) – which dealt with the themes of alienation and abstraction, and which are now regarded as classics of radical Italian cinema. It was not surprising, therefore, that for her Englishlanguage debut, Vitti chose to work with Joseph Losey – an American director who had moved to England in the 1950s after being blacklisted, and who had since won acclaim for his chilling thriller The Servant.
The film they made together, however, was a bit of a surprise: based on a popular cartoon strip, Modesty Blaise was a dazzlingly colourful camped-up caper about a female superspy, with a jazzy John Dankworth score. The idea was that it would be a rival to the Bond series – but Losey admitted that he had only ever watched half a Bond film, having got bored and turned it off; and critics and audiences were distinctly underwhelmed. The film (one of only two that Vitti made in English) is now regarded as a “minor cult oddity”, largely remembered as one of Mike Myers’s inspirations for his own Austin Powers spoof spy films. Returning to Italy, Vitti split up with Antonioni – and took her career in a new direction. In
1967, she accepted a part in a comedy – La ragazza con la pistola (The Girl with a Pistol),
about a Sicilian woman who travels to Britain to kill the fiancé who has dumped her. Italians were amazed to discover that she could make them laugh. The film was a massive box office hit; and for several years, Vitti was one of the country’s biggest comic stars.
Born Maria Luisa Ceciarelli in 1931, Vitti grew up in Rome and discovered a love for the theatre during the War. “As the bombs fell, when we had to take refuge in the shelters, my little brother and I would improvise little plays to entertain those around us,” she said, years later. She recalled her childhood as unhappy: her parents were poor, and strict; and when her family emigrated to the US, she decided to stay behind in Rome. She graduated from the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1953, then started work in the theatre, where she met Antonioni. He promised to make her a new Carole Lombard, but the films they made together were arty and “unapologetically cryptic”, said IndieWire. When L’Avventura was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960, the audience booed it. But then Roberto Rossellini started to champion its merits, prompting a swift critical reappraisal. Vitti made her last big-screen appearance in 1990, in a film called Secret Scandal, which she also directed. In 2000 she married her long-term partner, the screenwriter and composer Roberto Russo, who survives her. Vitti had withdrawn from public life some years ago; she was said to be suffering from Alzheimer’s.