Vittorio Gassman

Biography

Vittorio Gassman (born 1 September 1922 in Genoa, died 29 June 2000 in Rome) was an Italian actor and director known to audiences across Italy as Il Mattatore. He is regarded as one of the greatest Italian actors of his generation, and his career combines prestigious productions with a large number of popular comedies. His work helps explain how Italian stage performance moved into the postwar film industry.

His father was German and his mother was an Italian woman of Jewish origin from Pisa. Gassman moved to Rome while still young and trained at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica, where many future figures of Italian theatre and cinema also studied. He made his stage debut in Milan in 1942, and soon afterwards joined a company at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome with Tino Carraro and Ernesto Calindri. The group moved easily between bourgeois comedy and more intellectual theatre.

His film debut came in 1946 with Preludio d'amore, and his performance in Bitter Rice in 1948 brought him wider attention. His most important stage years were spent with Luchino Visconti's company, alongside Paolo Stoppa, Rina Morelli and Paola Borboni, where he played Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1952 he co-founded with Luigi Squarzina the Teatro d'Arte Italiano, which staged a complete version of Hamlet. He later directed and performed classics, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky on tours across Italy. The nickname came from a 1956 television series that he starred in, and it stayed with him for the rest of his life. He also founded a theatre school in Florence.

Gassman worked constantly in Italian and international cinema. His fluent English brought him Hollywood roles, including Rhapsody in 1954 with Elizabeth Taylor and War and Peace in 1956, and decades later Sleepers in 1996, where he appeared alongside Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Brad Pitt. He was also a versatile presence in Italian comedy, and The Easy Life and Scent of a Woman remain among his best-known titles. His marriages and his provocative public remarks drew considerable press attention and made him enemies in artistic circles. In the 1990s he hosted the television programme Tunnel, reciting everyday texts with the same seriousness he brought to Dante's Divine Comedy. He received the Donostia Award in 1988 and the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 1997. He suffered from depression in his later years but kept working, and he died of a heart attack at his home in Rome at the age of 77.

Key films

• The Great War (1959): plays Giovanni Busacca in a portrait of the First World War.
• The Easy Life (1962): as Bruno Cortona, one of his most celebrated comic performances.
• War and Peace (1956): as Anatole Kuragin in the Hollywood epic opposite Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda.
• Scent of a Woman (1974): a leading role in one of his most frequently cited Italian films of the period.
• Sleepers (1996): an ensemble role alongside De Niro, Hoffman and Pitt, marking a late return to large-scale American production.