Celebrity Biographies
Dino Risi
Dino Risi was one of the masters of Italian cinema. Throughout the half century that he was active, he hardly strayed from the ‘commedia all’italiana’. The director died in Rome, at dawn on June 7, 2008. “I think I’m a cretin with a bit of talent,” said the filmmaker, who had that sarcastic humor characteristic of his cinema. “The world of cinema is divided between great directors and cretinous directors. The great ones are boring because they always do the same thing.”
Born in Milan on December 23, 1923, Dino Risi was destined to follow in the footsteps of his father, a renowned doctor, and studied medicine to please him, in psychiatry. But although he worked for a while, his true vocation was cinema and he was immediately learning the trade, as an assistant to the teachers Mario Soldati and Alberto Lattuada .
After the Second World War, Risi made his debut as a director, with the documentary I bersaglieri della signora , followed by titles such as Vacance col gangster and El signo de Venus , in which his hallmarks were already present: a lot of humor mixed with large doses of social criticism by the influence of neorealism. Next, he was in charge of an episode of Love in the City , a collective film that brought together several of the best authors of Italian cinema, since the other segments were by Michelangelo Antonioni , Federico Fellini , Alberto Lattuada, Francesco Maselli and the legendary screenwriter Cesare zavattini. Success came to Dino Risi with Pan, love and… , which belonged to the series started with Pan, love and fantasy , always with the presence of Vittorio de Sica as the protagonist , and this time he was accompanied by the odd Sophia Loren .
“My referent, the actor with whom my cinema identifies the most, is Vittorio Gassman ,” Risi said of the protagonist of fifteen of his films. Together they gave rise to one of the great titles of Italian cinema of the 60s, The Escape , which narrated the car trip of a capricious forty-year-old, Bruno Cortona (Gassman) and a young law student ( Jean-Louis Trintignant ) along of two days. The film was ironic about the Italian economic boom of the 50s. Risi also directed Gassman in Perfume of a Woman, where the actor gave the ‘do chest’ as an irascible blind captain who undertook a journey accompanied by a young cadet. Gassman won Best Actor at Cannes, and the film was up for Oscars in the Adapted Screenplay and Foreign Language Film categories. In addition, he led to a famous American remake, Essence of a Woman , for which he won the Oscar Al Pacino .
Also noteworthy in Risi’s filmography is a comedy in twenty episodes, Monsters of Today , with Gassman and Ugo Tognazzi , in various roles. Risi himself co-directed with Mario Monicelli and Ettore Scola the sequel, ¡Que viva Italia! , again with Gassman and Tognazzi, and various performances by Alberto Sordi , another of the great Italian comedians. He made his last works for television; the last one, Le Ragazze di Miss Italia , is from 2002.
Risi has lived in a Roman hotel since he separated from his wife, Claudia, a Swiss national, some forty years ago. “I’m leaving,” he told his wife, and she replied, “I’ll help you pack your bags.” In that same hotel he died. His son From him Marco Risi ( Glass Bars ) is also a film director.