Massimo Girotti

Versatile actor of Italian cinema

Massimo Girotti, actor: born Mogliano, Italy 18 May 1918; married (one son, one daughter); died Rome 5 January 2003.

Massimo Girotti was one of the most popular leading men of post-war Italian cinema, an actor in whom an easy charm and athletic build were elegantly combined to ensure six decades of continuous employment in more than 100 films, together with a variety of roles which ranged from the serious and dramatic, for such directors as Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, to the colourful and commercial, for such as Riccardo Freda, Sergio Corbucci and Mario Bava.

Born in the Macerata province of Italy in 1918, the son of a chemist, Girotti was raised in Rome. He began to take acting lessons while studying jurisprudence and in 1939 was chosen for a small part in Mario Soldati's début film, Dora Nelson. Two years later, he made his name in a dual role in Alessandro Blasetti's mythological epic Il corona di ferro ("The Iron Crown"), and was then cast by Rossellini as a prisoner-of-war in Un pilota ritorna ("A Pilot Returns", 1942).

That year, Girotti appeared in perhaps his most important film, Visconti's Ossessione, a reworking of James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice which gave birth to the Italian neo-realist movement and marked the beginning of a collaboration with Visconti which continued through Senso (Livia, 1954) and Le streghe (The Witches, 1967) to the director's last film, L'innocente (The Intruder), in 1976. Girotti's theatre work also included Euripides' Hippolytus, staged in the ancient Greek theatre at Syracuse in 1956.

In the immediate post-war period, Girotti made La porta del cielo (The Gate of Heaven, 1945) for Vittorio De Sica, as well as Giuseppe De Santis's Caccia tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947) and two films for Pietro Germi, Gioventu perduta (Lost Youth, 1949) and In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law, 1949), the latter of which won him Italy's Silver Ribbon award as best actor. Also in 1949, Girotti made his first foray into the historical epic, in Blasetti's Fabiola, the film which set the trend for much of the sword-and-sandal genre which flourished in the 1950s.

Having appeared in the début films of Soldati, Visconti, and De Santis, Girotti continued this trend in Michelangelo Antonioni's first film, Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 1950). Following De Santis' Roma, ore 11 in 1952, Girotti turned in a sturdy performance in the title role of Riccardo Freda's Spartaco (Spartacus the Gladiator, 1953) but was sorely wasted in romantic tosh such as Antonio Pietrangeli's Souvenir d'Italie (It Happened in Rome, 1957).

In the 1960s, Girotti played Orpheus in Freda's I giganti della Tessaglia (The Giants of Thessaly, 1960) and a villain in Sergio Corbucci's Romolo e Remo (Duel of the Titans, 1961) before making an impressive return to art-house cinema in Pasolini's Teorem (Theorem, 1968) and Medea (1969). In 1972, he played a small but important part in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris, as well as appearing in Bava's perennially popular horror film Baron Blood.

Girotti's later films included Ettore Scola's Passion d'amore (1981) and Liliana Cavani's Interno berlinese (The Berlin Affair, 1985). His last film, Ferzan Ozpetek's La finestra di fronte (The Front Window), was completed in 2001.

John Exshaw