• Giuliano Montaldo "I wouldn't make a film about Berlusconi because I don't make porn films"

The Italian director, screenwriter and actor Giuliano Montaldo, who directed more than 20 films, some as internationally famous as 'Sacco e Vanzetti' (1971), and a filmmaker who always fought against the injustices of power, has died in Rome at the age of 93, Italian media report today.

Montaldo (Genova, 1930), who began his career as an actor in the fifties, directed more than 20 films, after debuting with 'Tiro al Piccione' (1961), although his greatest successes came at the end of that decade and the beginning of the next, fundamental in his career, closely linked to American cinema.

Collaborator of Gillo Pontecorvo, with whom he worked as assistant director in several films, including the mythical 'The Battle of Algiers', Montaldo directed stars such as Edward G. Robinson, Janeth Leigh, John Casavettes, Klaus Kinski and Gian Maria Volonté, fetish actor of some of his greatest successes.

After the police 'Gli Intocacabili' (1969), another of his greatest successes, the director made a trilogy about power with 'Got mis uns' (1970), about military power; 'Sacco e Vanzetti' (1971), on the judicial, and 'Giordano Bruno' (1973) on the religious, which earned him recognition, in particular the second, on the real story of two Italian anarchists who emigrated to the US in the early twentieth century.

The interpretation of Volonté and Riccardo Cucciolla (awarded at the Cannes Film Festival), as well as the song of the mythical Ennio Morricone popularized by Joan Baez, made 'Sacco e Vanzetti' a great international success.

"When the film was released, (Chilean President) Salvador Allende sent me a note saying that he had seen it in the cinema, along with the audience, and that he had loved it. A film about Allende was one of my two dreams that never came true," the director recalled in an interview with Corriere della Sera.

Other of his next most notable works were 'Agnese va a morire' (1976), 'Circuito chiuso' (1978), 'Il giocattolo' (1979) and 'Marco Polo' (1982), a series of eight chapters for television in which Burt Lancaster, Anne Bancroft, F. Murray Abraham and John Guilgud, among many other celebrities, acted.

His latest films include 'Gli occhiali d'oro' (1987), 'Tempo di uccidere' (1989), 'I demoni di San Pietroburgo' (2008) and 'L'industriale' (2011), as well as conducting several operas at the Verona Arena, such as Tundarot', 'il Trovatore' or 'La Boheme' in the 90s.

Married to the actress, screenwriter and director Vera Pescarolo, who was a tireless and omnipresent collaborator, with whom he starred in a long love story, as he defined it, he also leaves a daughter, Elisabetta.

  • cinema
  • Italy