On the 100th birthday of Marcello Mastroianni: The ironic Latin lover

The even more beautiful half of the dream couple had just celebrated their 90th birthday. A week ago Italy celebrated its Absolute diva Sophia Loren, in a small circle and a little respectfully, in the Roman Cinema moderno.

Her long-term partner didn’t make it that far. Marcello Mastroianni, who was born 100 years ago this Saturday, only survived his 70th birthday for a few years; he died in Paris in 1996.

Loren’s explanation for her dazzling cast-iron appearance is probably a big lie (“It’s all the pasta”). On the other hand, it can be said that there were far too many cigarettes that brought Mastroianni underground prematurely.

The Volcanic and the Broken

Loren was the epitome and also a bit of the kitsch cliché of those Italian ones femininity, which she herself had a significant impact on and exported to Hollywood – volcanic temperament, not to be sniffed at, but above all: breathtakingly beautiful – then Mastroianni was formative for the image of the Italian man.

Of course there was no real counterpart, the type was a slightly broken one. Mastroianni didn’t play a glowing-eyed daredevil, he was ironic, self-ironic, even passive and occasionally slightly disoriented. This is how Federico Fellini portrayed him in “La dolce vita” in 1960, as a reporter, a quiet, slightly depressed observer of the “sweet life” of the stars and starlets in Rome at that time.

That’s how Mastroianni usually played, especially with Loren, who always covered space. The episodic film “Ieri, oggi, domani”, which received the Oscar for best foreign film in 1965, is typical: Mastroianni plays, among other things, the stressed husband of a Neapolitan cigarette seller (Loren).

So that she doesn’t end up in prison for her contraband, she has to keep getting pregnant – by her husband, who can’t or doesn’t want to anymore.

His roles: impotent, gay and insecure men

When he was in his mid-thirties, Mastroianni played the impotent “Bell’Antonio” based on the bitter social novel by Vitaliano Brancati and 13 years later, again with Sofia Loren, the gay Gabriele in Ettore Scola’s “A Special Day”. In Fellini’s “City of Women” in 1980, his corrupt would-be macho ironized the confusion into which the new women’s movement had plunged the masters of creation.

Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni was born on September 28, 1924 in Fontana Liri in Ciociaria, a countryside east of Rome. His father was a carpenter, his mother came from a middle-class Russian-Jewish family that had migrated to Italy. The son only learned about his mother’s Jewish roots late.

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He too was supposed to become a craftsman. But the young man, who had just escaped internment in Nazi-occupied Italy, had two left hands and preferred to take acting lessons. “La dolce vita,” the film that made him a star, was the beginning of a lifelong collaboration with Federico Fellini. But Mastroianni also filmed with Antonioni, Visconti, who is considered his real discoverer, and others from the cream of Italian directors from the 1950s to the 80s.

“My drug is called Catherine”

Since 1970, works have been added in France, the homeland of Catherine Deneuve. Mastroianni, who remained married to his Italian colleague Flora Carabella until his death, said of her: “My drug is called Catherine.” Deneuve, who had his daughter Chiara, called him “the greatest love of my life.”

This Saturday they will celebrate probably the city’s greatest son in his small hometown of Fontana Liri. But of course the whole world is celebrating, at least the part of it that loves the cinema. There is a retrospective on Mastroianni’s 100th birthday in Albania’s capital Tirana, as the Tagesspiegel learned.

A stara god, as Italy so appropriately calls the male stars. But a very special one, says the author of his most recent biography, the film critic Barbara Rossi. She gave her book an appropriate subtitle: “The Friendly God.”