Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni[a]Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (28 September 1924 – 19 December 1996) was an Italian film actor and one of the country's most iconic male performers of the 20th century. He played leading roles for many of Italy's top directors in a career spanning 147 films between 1939 and 1996, and garnered many international honours including two BAFTA Awards, two Best Actor awards at the Venice and Cannes film festivals, two Golden Globes, and three Academy Award nominations.
Born in the province of Frosinone and raised in Turin and Rome, Mastroianni made his film debut in 1939 at the age of 14, but did not seriously pursue acting until the 1950s, when he made his critical and commercial breakthrough in the caper comedy Big Deal on Madonna Street (1959). He became an international celebrity through his collaborations with director Federico Fellini, first as a disillusioned tabloid columnist in La Dolce Vita (1960), then as a creatively-stifled filmmaker in 8½ (1963). Excelling in both dramatic and comedic roles,[4] he formed a notable on-screen duo with actress and sex symbolSophia Loren, co-starring with her in eight films between 1954 and 1994.
Despite international acclaim, Mastroianni largely shunned Hollywood, and remained a quintessentially Italian thespian for the majority of his career.[5] Nonetheless, he was the first actor to receive an Academy Award nomination for a non-English language performance, and was nominated for Best Actor three times – Divorce Italian Style (1961), A Special Day (1977), and Dark Eyes (1987). He was one of only three actors, the others being Jack Lemmon and Dean Stockwell, to win the prestigious Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor twice. Mastroianni's contributions to Italian art and culture saw him receive multiple civil honours, including the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, the highest-ranking knighthood of the country.[6]
Mastroianni made his screen debut as an uncredited extra in Marionette (1939) when he was fourteen,[13] and made intermittent minor film appearances until landing his first big role in Atto d'accusa (1951).[14] Within a decade he became a major international celebrity, starring in Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958);[15] and in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) playing a disillusioned and self-loathing tabloid columnist who spends his days and nights exploring Rome's decadent high society.[16] Mastroianni followed La Dolce Vita with another signature role, that of a film director who, amidst self-doubt and troubled love affairs, finds himself in a creative block while making a film in Fellini's 8½ (1963).[17]
He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor three times: for Divorce Italian Style, A Special Day and Dark Eyes.[18] Mastroianni, Dean Stockwell and Jack Lemmon are the only actors to have been twice awarded the Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival.[19] Mastroianni won it in 1970 for The Pizza Triangle and in 1987 for Dark Eyes.[20]
Mastroianni married Flora Carabella on 12 August 1950.[23] They had one daughter together, Barbara (1951–2018),[24] and informally separated in 1964 because of his affairs with younger women.[23][25] Mastroianni's first serious relationship after the separation was with Faye Dunaway, his co-star in A Place for Lovers (1968). Dunaway wanted to marry and have children, but Mastroianni, a Catholic, refused to divorce Carabella.[23] In 1970, after more than two years of waiting for Mastroianni to change his mind, Dunaway left him.[23] Mastroianni told a reporter for People magazine in 1987 that he never got over the breakup. "She was the woman I loved the most," he said. "I'll always be sorry to have lost her. I was whole with her for the first time in my life."[26] In her 1995 autobiography Looking for Gatsby, Dunaway wrote: "I wish to this day it had worked out."[27]
Mastroianni had a daughter, Chiara Mastroianni (born 28 May 1972), with French actress Catherine Deneuve, who was nearly 20 years his junior and lived with him for four years in the 1970s. During that time, the couple made four films together: It Only Happens to Others (1971), La cagna (1972), A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973) and Don't Touch the White Woman! (1974). After Mastroianni and Deneuve broke up, Carabella reportedly offered to adopt Chiara because her parents' busy careers kept them away so often. Deneuve would have none of it.[28]
Mastroianni died of pancreatic cancer on 19 December 1996 at the age of 72.[30] Both of his daughters, as well as Deneuve and Tatò, were at his bedside.[23] The Trevi Fountain in Rome, associated with his role in Fellini's La Dolce Vita, was symbolically turned-off and draped in black as a tribute.[31][32] A funeral was held at the Church of St. Sulpice in Paris on 20 December before his remains were transferred to Rome where a second ceremony took place at the city hall on 22 December before he was interred in his family vault in Verano Cemetery.[33][34]
At the 1997 Venice Film Festival, Chiara, Carabella, and Deneuve tried to block the screening of Tatò's four-hour documentary, Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember. The festival refused and the film was shown.[35] The three women reportedly tried to do the same thing at Cannes. Tatò said Mastroianni had willed her all rights to his image.[35]