Dino Risi

Biography

Dino Risi (23 December 1916 – 7 June 2008) was an Italian film director and screenwriter who, alongside Mario Monicelli, Luigi Comencini, Nanni Loy and Ettore Scola, helped shape the tradition known as commedia all'italiana. His films, which mix social satire with portraits of the middle class, made him one of the most recognisable Italian filmmakers of the postwar decades and of the economic boom of the fifties and sixties.

Born in Milan, Risi was orphaned at around the age of twelve and was looked after by relatives and friends of the family. He studied medicine at the University of Milan but did not pursue the psychiatric career his family had hoped for. He entered the film industry as an assistant director to figures such as Mario Soldati and Alberto Lattuada. After making his own films in the early 1950s, he gained wider recognition with Pane, amore e... (1955), the sequel to the films directed by Comencini, which established him as a director of commercial success. He is also credited with giving early opportunities to performers who later became major stars, including Sophia Loren and Vittorio Gassman.

His most celebrated work includes A Difficult Life (1961), The Easy Life (1962), I mostri (1963) and Scent of a Woman (1974). He worked with many of the leading Italian actors of his era, among them Alberto Sordi, Nino Manfredi, Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni, Monica Vitti and Ugo Tognazzi, and his critical view of vanity, hypocrisy and contradiction in Italian society stayed consistent across decades. Scent of a Woman was remade in the United States by Martin Brest with Al Pacino in 1992.

In 2002 he received the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival. He died in Rome in 2008. His two sons, Claudio and Marco Risi, also became film directors. Today his work is remembered as one of the sharpest portraits of Italian society in the second half of the twentieth century.

Key films

• Pane, amore e... (1955)
• A Difficult Life (1961)
• The Sign of Venus (1955)
• The Easy Life (1962)
• I mostri (1963)
• Scent of a Woman (1974)