Alberto Sordi

Affectionately known as “Albertone”, the quintessential master of Italian comedy, a genre that reached its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, died on February 25, 2003 at his residence in Rome, according to his relatives due to an illness that had lasted since A long time ago. Nobody knew how to represent the average post-war Italian like him, that ordinary guy who with his efforts got ahead of the serious problems dragged on since World War II. “I have always wanted to represent the lives of all Italians, whom I think I know very well,” he declared.

Although he starred in more than two hundred films, in addition to directing eighteen, Alberto Sordi was more than just an actor and filmmaker. His compatriots considered him a symbol, almost an institution. Not surprisingly, with the arrival of the euro, in 2002, Sordi was in charge of throwing the last lira into the Trevi Fountain. On the day he turned 80, the mayor of Rome, a great admirer of his, handed him over for twenty-four hours as a gift. And during the jubilee in the year 2000, he was commissioned to represent the actors on the day the Pope paid homage to his profession. “Thank you for being Pope,” he told her affectionately.

He came from one of the most humble but charming neighborhoods of Rome, Trastevere, where he was born in 1920 into a family of workers, as his father was a musician and his mother a governess. In that same place he discovered his vocation as an actor, when he worked as an altar boy in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. “In front of the altar, seeing the people before me, it seemed to me that I was on a stage,” he recalled nostalgically. He got into show business very early, at seventeen, when MGM hired him as Oliver Hardy ‘s voice actor., the fat man of “the fat and the skinny”. He gained some notoriety in the late 1930s and 1940s as an actor in radio soap operas and variety shows. Paradoxically, it was very difficult for him to succeed in the cinema. He did not make his debut until 1951, with a film based on one of his radio programs, Mamma mia, que susto , but it was rather poorly received by critics. Shortly after, the unrepeatable Federico Fellini settled in the Italian capital , whom he remembered as “a friend from the first day he arrived in Rome”. The filmmaker turned Sordi into El jeque blanco , and soon after they worked together again on Los inútiles. Although the two got along very well, they did not have many opportunities to work together again, because “the type of cinema I made did not suit me. I needed a more elegant actor, like Marcello Mastroianni ”.

But while the director became a legend, Sordi had acquired many tables and did the same on the other hand with great successes such as An American in Rome , The Sign of Venus , The Great War or Universal Judgment , and he even walked on occasion American cinema, although he only shone in a brief role as a priest in A Farewell to Arms. His activity was so intense that he would shoot up to eleven films a year, so it can be said that in real life he was as hard-working as the multi-employed citizen he used to play.

With An Italian in London , from 1966, Alberto Sordi went behind the cameras for the first time, an activity that he did more and more frequently. Some of his titles did well at the box office, such as An Italian in America , Summer Vice or My Love , Help Me . Meanwhile, he continued to succeed as an actor, on an international scale, especially with The Big Traffic Jam and Que Viva Italia , a satire of Italian society in the 70s, in which he offered an authentic recital playing various characters in various episodes. He never retired from the cinema, although logically, due to his age, he worked less and less. After the magnificent Story of a poor man, by Ettore Scola , his last work as an actor and director was Forbidden Encounters , which was screened in 1999 at the San Sebastian Festival, where he received a tribute.