Director of ‘Last Tango,’ ‘Last Emperor’ was ‘among the greatest’

ROME — Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, who won Oscars with “The Last Emperor” and whose erotic drama “Last Tango in Paris” enthralled and shocked the world, died Monday. He was 77.

Italy’s state-run RAI said Bertolucci died at his home in Rome, surrounded by family.

“He will be remembered among the greatest in Italian and world film,” the Venice Film Festival, which awarded Bertolucci a lifetime achievement award in 2007, said in a statement.

Bertolucci’s movies often explored the sexual relations among characters stuck in a psychological crisis, as in “Last Tango,” which was banned in his own Italy for over a decade. The self-professed Marxist also did not shy away from politics and ideology, as in “The Conformist,” which some critics consider Bertolucci’s masterpiece.

“Maybe I’m an idealist, but I still think of the movie theater as a cathedral where we all go together to dream the dream together,” he said upon receiving an award from the Director’s Guild of America for his 1987 film “The Last Emperor.”

That movie handed Bertolucci his greatest success. In 1988 it won all the nine Academy Awards that it had been nominated for — including best movie and best director.

The movie — the first Western feature film to win permission to shoot in Beijing’s Forbidden City — follows the life of China’s last emperor, from child-king at the end of the Qing Dynasty to war criminal and finally to an ordinary citizen in the People’s Republic.

It was filmed in the lush and vivid style that was one of Bertolucci’s trademarks. It featured grandiose scenes and intimate moments, and a flashback structure that is typical of biopics.

It was with “Last Tango” in 1972, when Bertolucci already was established as a bright star of international cinema, that the director shot to stardom, and notoriety.

The film, starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider as a middle-aged man and younger woman who engage in a brutal sexual relationship in a bare Paris apartment, shocked the world and incurred censorship in his native country.

But its raw and improvisational style also earned Brando and Bertolucci Oscar nominations and was likened by New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael to Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” as a revolutionary work of art.

His follow-up project — “1900,” with Robert De Niro and Gerard Departdieu — won some critical praise, but ended up a spectacular commercial flop.

Bertolucci’s later movies included “The Sheltering Sky” (1990), featuring Debra Winger and John Malkovich; “Little Buddha” (1993) with Keanu Reeves; “Stealing Beauty” (1996), starring Liv Tyler, and “The Dreamers.”