Academy Award-winning Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci has sadly passed away at the age of 77 over the weekend. According to THR, a spokesperson for the director said he died of cancer.
Bertolucci was an acclaimed director, with over two dozen films completed in his five-decade-long career. He’s probably best known for his Oscar-winning film “The Last Emperor” and his Marlon Brando film “Last Tango in Paris,” and his lifelong partnership with celebrated cinematographer Vittorio Storraro; they made 9 films together. Bertolucci was heralded as one of the great Italian filmmakers, but has always lived under the shadow of Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini and more. Some of his other seminal works include “1900” with Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu, which ran 317 minutes in its original version and is still not readily available on home video, “The Conformist,” with Jean-Louis Trintignant, often rightly praised as a visual masterpiece, and the first of his collaborations with Storraro and his penultimate film, 2003’s controversial and NC-17 rated “The Dreamers” with Michael Pitt, Eva Green and Louis Garrel. Films like “La Commare Secca” are available on Criterion, but there’s a substantial part of his career that isn’t available on DVD or streaming. He was presented with the inaugural Honorary Palme d’Or Award at the opening ceremony of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
“The Last Emperor” was released in 1987 and was the first Western film to be granted permission and support from the Chinese government to film in the Middle Kingdom since 1949. The film told the story of Aisin-Gioro Puyi, who was the titular emperor. “The Last Emperor” would go on to be nominated for nine Academy Awards, and ended up winning each one, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Score, and several others.
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However, even though his film dominated the Oscars that year, perhaps his most well-known film was the Brando-starring 1972 film “Last Tango in Paris.” That film followed the exploits of a young widowed American man who comes to Paris and begins a sexually-charged relationship with a woman. Despite many feeling the film was far too sexually explicit, ‘Last Tango’ was critically acclaimed upon its release, earning Brando a Best Actor Oscar nomination and Bertolucci a Best Director nom. However, in recent years, the film and the filmmaker became the source of controversy, after comments from Bertolucci explaining that a sex scene involving co-star Maria Schneider in the film was “non-consensual.”
Bertolucci’s final film is the 2012 feature, “Me and You.” That film was screened out of competition at that year’s Cannes Film Festival, but never caught on as his previous works had.
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From 1979 until his passing, Bertolucci was married to British filmmaker Clare Peploe.