Film

Bernardo Bertolucci, ‘Last Tango in Paris’ director, dies at age of 77

Director of ‘Last Tango in Paris’ and ‘The Last Emperor’ dies at home after an illness

Bernardo Bertolucci: the Italian director in 2013. Photograph: Fred Prouser/Reuters

Mon Nov 26 2018 - 09:11

Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian director famous for movies such as Last Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor, has died at 77, Italian media reported on Monday.

Bertolucci, who was from the northern Italian town of Parma, had been ill and died at his home in Rome, media said.

Bertolucci, who won Oscars for The Last Emperor and whose erotic drama Last Tango In Paris enthralled and shocked the world, died at his home in Rome, surrounded by family.

Bertolucci's movies often explored the sexual relations among characters stuck in a psychological crisis, as in Last Tango In Paris.

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Despite working with A-list international stars, Bertolucci always defended his own filmmaking style against what he said was the pressure of the US film industry.

He maintained critical success for most of his career, weathering the controversies that his sexually provocative work would stir and some commercial flops.

"When it comes to commercial cinema, I have the strange pleasure of feeling that I'm from another tribe, an infiltrator," he told Italian daily Corriere della Sera in 1990.

He was honoured for lifetime achievement at the Cannes film festival in 2011.

Bertolucci’s movies also bore the imprint of the director’s own experiences in psychoanalysis. He always said that making films was his way of communicating with the audience. It was his personal language.

"Maybe I'm an idealist, but I still think of the movie theatre as a cathedral where we all go together to dream the dream together," he said upon receiving an award from the Director's Guild of America for his 1987 film The Last Emperor.

That film handed Bertolucci his greatest success. In 1988 it won all the nine Academy Awards that it had been nominated for, including best movie and best director.

The film, the first Western feature film to win permission to shoot in Beijing’s Forbidden City, follows the life of China’s last emperor, from child-king at the end of the Qing Dynasty to war criminal and finally to an ordinary citizen in the People’s Republic.

It was filmed in the lush and vivid style that was one of Bertolucci’s trademarks. It featured grandiose scenes and intimate moments, and a flashback structure that is typical of biopics.

Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who often worked with Bertolucci and won one of his three Oscars with The Last Emperor, compared the director with William Faulkner.

“His style is not unlike that of Faulkner, who’ll go on for 30 pages without a period. Bernardo doesn’t just use the camera to convey just one sentence. Everything flows into everything else,” said Storaro.

Bertolucci was born in the northern city of Parma on March 16, 1941, the son of poet Attilio Bertolucci and his wife Ninetta. The family moved to Rome when Bertolucci was 13.

Bertolucci was married to the English writer and director Clare Peploe. They had no children. – PA

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