Celebrity Biographies
Giorgio Albertazzi
He considered himself a man of the theater, but moviegoers remember him as the lead in “Last Year in Marienbad.” Giorgio Albertazzi died in Roccastrada, Tuscany, on May 28, 2016, at the age of 92, due to heart disease. “We have lost one of the greatest actors in Italian cinema and theater,” says Sergio Mattarella, President of the Republic of Italy.
Born on August 20, 1923, in Fiesole (Tuscany), Giorgio Albertazzi was imprisoned after World War II. He was imprisoned for belonging to a fascist militia that had executed deserters. In 1947 an amnesty law came into force by which he was released. From that moment he changed ideologically, supporting libertarian causes even anti-establishment.
He began in the theater at the hands of a left-wing militant, Luchino Visconti , who gave him the leading role in “Troilo and Cressida”, Shakespeare’s play. Some time later, in 1951, Raffaelo Pacini gave him his first film role, the statesman Lorenzo de’ Medici, in Lorenzaccio .
However, he embodied his best-known role for French cinema, in Last Year at Marienbad , where he was X (the characters have no names), the stranger with an Italian accent who approaches a woman whom he claims to have known before. . Alain Resnais ‘s film divided critics due to the ambiguity of its narrative structure, but it had an enormous impact, and was awarded the Golden Lion in Venice in 1961.
In 2007 he married Pia de Tolomei di Lippa, 36 years his junior. In 1996 he was named Cavaliere di Gran Croce Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, while in 2002 he received the Medaglia d’oro ai benemeriti della cultura e dell’arte. He was active until the end, since in 2015 he starred on the stage in a version of “The Merchant of Venice”, and he left the comedy La Sindrome di Antonio , by Claudio Rossi Massimi, pending theatrical release, in which he is one of the protagonists.