/ 7 June 2008

Great master of Italian comedy dies in Rome

Filmmaker Dino Risi, whose films helped shape Italian comedy during a career that spanned seven decades, died on June 7 in Rome, Italy’s Ansa news agency reported. He was 91.

Born in Milan, Risi worked with the greatest Italian actors of the 20th century, including Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassmann, Ugo Tognazzi and Alberto Sordi, as well as French stars such as Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Louis Trintignant.

His 54 films included Profumo di donna, which earned him an Academy Award nomination in 1974, a French Cesar for best foreign film and a prize for Gassman at Cannes. It was remade 18 years as Scent of a Woman starring Al Pacino.

In 2002, the Venice festival awarded him a Golden Lion award in recognition of his life’s work.

News of his death triggered an outpouring of praise.

”He was one of the great masters of Italian comedy,” the newspaper La Repubblica said, calling him ”a sort of Billy Wilder made in Italy”.

”He made films that made film history,” said La Stampa.

Trained as a doctor with a speciality in psychiatry, Risi eased into filmmaking first as a critic then documentary producer before turning full-time director in the 1950s when he moved to Rome.

He quickly won notice with films like the 1955 Pane, amore e… starring a young Sophia Loren and Poveri ma belli (Poor But Beautiful) the following year.

His films had a lightheartedness that often turned to drama, like the 1962 classic Il sorpasso (The Easy Life) starring Gassmann and Trintignant — the movie regarded in Italy as his greatest film.

His last work, Le Ragazze di Miss Italia, a comic take on the Miss Italy pageant that he wrote and directed for Italian television, was made in 2002.

The father of Italian comedy was also a master at self-derision.

Last July, when renowned filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman died on the same day, the 90-year-old Risi said: ”I too could could go at any moment but I’d be better off waiting because now they’d announce my death after the sports results.”

Even the Vatican did not escape his irony. Last June, when it condemned drivers who wrecklessly overtake other cars as sinful, Risi quipped: ”I think the Vatican is falling behind and that’s why they’re stepping harder and harder on the accelerator.” — Sapa-AFP