Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci, whose career defined scandal and evoked eroticism and sumptuous beauty, has died of cancer in Rome. The director of Last Tango In Paris was 77 and had been confined to a wheelchair for much of the last 10 years.
A product of Italian New Wave cinema’s golden era, the Parma-born Bertolucci achieved international acclaim, winning the Oscar for Best Director for 1987’s The Last Emperor.
Beginning as a poet, Bertolucci entered film work as a writer for Pier Paolo Pasolini before attracting attention as a director-writer with 1970’s The Conformist, a stylish work that brought him an Oscar nod for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.
But it was his follow-up film, 1972’s Last Tango In Paris, which earned him an international reputation and infamy. Equally praised and condemned on release, the highly polarizing film retains a divisive legacy. Its graphic and violent content and an infamous rape scene between Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider still cause controversy four decades later.
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In an exclusive essay to the Daily Mail in 2007, Schneider wrote she felt violated by the experience, saying it wasn’t consensual, and Bertolucci later admitted that Schneider was not aware of what would happen in the scene.
“I’d been in a way horrible to Maria because I didn’t tell her what was going on,” Bertolucci said in an interview at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris in 2013. “Because I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress.”
The film earned Oscar nominations for Brando as Best Actor and Bertolucci as Best Director.
Bertolucci’s follow-up films, equally troubling and indulgent in their vision, 1900 (with Robert De Niro) and La Luna (Jill Clayburgh starring in a disturbing portrait of a tormented mother) confirmed Bertolucci’s avant-garde reputation but failed to extend his popularity outside of the arthouse circuit.
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In 1987, after years of negotiation, Bertolucci succeeded in becoming the first foreign director in 40 years to receive full government cooperation in China. The resulting $25-million production of The Last Emperor, starring Peter O’Toole and John Lone, marks one of the last great adventures in epic filmmaking. Nominated for nine Oscars, it swept the boards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
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The director followed immediately with two films, often referred to as part of his “Oriental Trilogy” — 1990’s version of Paul Bowles’ Sheltering Sky, starring with Debra Winger and John Malkovich, and Little Buddha (1993) with Keanu Reeves. His later films, immediately recognizable by their languorous beauty, include Stealing Beauty from 1996 with Liv Tyler and Jeremy Irons and 2003’s The Dreamers, which introduced Eva Green. Bertolucci’s last feature was 2013’s Me and You.
from PEOPLE.com https://ift.tt/2DOx0af
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