MONICA VITTI
(3 November 1931 – 2 February 2022)
Although she had a career in films for nearly forty years, it is most likely that the Italian actress Monica Vitti, who has died aged 90 from complications associated with Alzheimer’s, will be best remembered for the four films she made in the 1960s with the director Michelangelo Antonioni. For a time, she became his muse and he arguably made his best films either with her or at least they were the films with which we mainly associate the director. Vitti met Antonioni in 1957 when she dubbed the voice of the actress Dorian Gray in his film Il Grido (The Cry), the grim story of a working man's life around the Po Valley, with Steve Cochran, Alida Valli and Betsy Blair. In 1960 came the first film in Antonioni's trilogy, L'Avventura, about the search for a missing woman (Lea Massari) by her lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her girlfriend played by Vitti. Although the film divided its audience at the time because very little happened in the plot of this almost two-and-a-half-hour film, it still won the Jury Prize at Cannes and it put Vitti on the world movie map.
Monica Vitti then appeared in the other two films in the trilogy, La Notte (The Night, 1961) with Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, and L'Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) with Alain Delon. All were directed by Antonioni and all were about unhappy relationships in one way or another. Again they were directed in a way that emphasised the look of the film over any narrative concerns. These three films gathered many nominations and awards and remain highlights in the pantheon of Italian, if not of world cinema.
Monica Vitti was born Maria Luisa Ceciarelli to Adele (née Vittilia) and Angelo Ceciarelli. She later took her mother's maiden name for her own professional name. As a teenager she acted in amateur theatre before attending the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome. Then she toured Germany with an Italian company until her debut on stage in Rome. Her first film was as an extra in Laugh! Laugh! Laugh! in 1954, and after that she began to appear on television in series and TV movies.
Following the period working on Antonioni's trilogy she decided she wanted to be a comedy actress, appearing in Roger Vadim's film of Francoise Sagan's play Chateau en Suede (1963) with Curd Jürgens, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Françoise Hardy. After Three Fables of Love, a trio of comedies with Vitti, Leslie Caron and Anna Karina, and another anthology movie, High Infidelity, Vitti worked with Antonioni again on Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert, 1964) with Richard Harris, in another glum tale, this time about a woman involved in a car accident. The director shot his cast as human figures locked in a miserable industrial landscape. However, despite its bleakness, the film won Antonioni three awards at the Venice Film Festival.
Vitti continued making films in Italy including the very oddly-titled On My Way to the Crusades I Met a Girl Who... (aka The Chastity Belt or The Wrong Key, 1967) with Tony Curtis, Hugh Griffith, John Richardson and Nino Castelnuovo. Writer Larry Gelbart based it on one of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron tales. It was released in the USA two years after production but hardly anywhere else.
On the other hand, and among many other titles Vitti, made Mario Monicelli's The Girl with a Pistol (1968) which was set in London and nominated for an Academy Award, followed by Ettore Scola's The Pizza Triangle (1970) with Marcello Mastroianni, then Miklós Jancsó's The Pacifist (1970) with Pierre Clementi, and Luigi Magni's La Tosca (1973) from the play by Victorien Sardou, with Vitti as Tosca and Vittorio Gassman as Scarpia. Vitti also worked with directors outside of Italy, including Joseph Losey on Modesty Blaise (1966) with Dirk Bogarde and Terence Stamp, and with Luis Buñuel for The Phantom of Liberty (1974) with Jean-Claude Brialy, Adolfo Celi and Michel Piccoli. In 1979 she made another English-language film, Michael Ritchie's An Almost Perfect Affair, with Keith Carradine, which was set during the Cannes Film Festival.
Many of Vitti's later films probably never played outside Italy but the actress kept on working on several movies a year until the late 1980s. In 1983 she directed and appeared in a TV movie, La fuggiDiva, from her own screenplay. In 1986 she co-wrote, produced and starred in Francesca e Mia, about the break-up of a marriage, and in 1990 she appeared in and directed her own co-written script, Secret Scandal, about a woman contemplating suicide, with Elliott Gould, Gino Pernice and Catherine Spaak. Vitti made her last appearance in the television film Ma Tu Mi Vuoi Bene? in 1992.
After her close relationship with Antonioni ended, Monica Vitti had a relationship with the cinematographer Carlo Di Palma, who then directed some of her films. However, she married the writer, photographer and director Roberto Russo in 1995, although they had lived together from 1968. She won several Italian film awards including three Nastro d'Argentos, five David di Donatello awards, four Golden Grails and also the Silver Bear for Lifetime Achievement at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1984, the same year she was honoured by the French Culture Minister Jack Lang who presented her with the Order of Arts and Letters. In 1993 she was awarded the Festival Tribute at the Creteil International Women's Film Festival in France.
MICHAEL DARVELL