LEGENDARY ITALIAN FILM director Bernardo Bertolucci, whose films include Last Tango In Paris and 1900, died on Monday aged 77.

Bertolucci died at his home in Rome early on Monday, his press office Punto e Virgola said in an email.

Considered one of the giants of Italian and world cinema, Bertolucci was the only Italian ever to win the Oscar for best film, snapping up the award in 1988 for The Last Emperor.

The biographical masterpiece about the last Chinese emperor won a total of nine Oscars, all of those for which it was nominated.

He acquired notoriety for his 1972 erotic drama Last Tango In Paris starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider which featured a controversial sex scene involving butter.

He had been wheelchair-bound for several years and won an honorary Palme d’Or for his life’s work at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

Former festival president Gilles Jacob said he was saddened by the death of “the last emperor of Italian cinema, the lord of all epics and all escapade”.

“The party is over: it takes two to tango,” Jacob told AFP.

Born in Parma, northeastern Italy, on 16 March, 1941, Bertolucci made films that were often highly politicised, dealing with workers’ struggles in 1900 or the fate of left-wingers in fascist Italy in The Conformist.

His father, a poet, history lecturer and cinema critic, gave him his first 16mm camera aged 15.

Bertolucci studied literature before turning to film, meeting Pier Paolo Pasolini as his assistant director on Accattone in 1961.

He co-wrote the 1968 spaghetti Western classic Once Upon a Time in the West along with Dario Argento and director Sergio Leone.

A member of the Italian Communist party, Bertolucci made the epic 1900 about the class struggle between Italian peasants and aristocrats spanning almost a century and starring Robert De Niro, Burt Lancaster and Gerard Depardieu.

Controversy

In Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci acknowledged Schneider was not aware that Brando’s character would use butter as a lubricant during the scene in which the actor simulates anally penetrating his lover, played by then 19-year-old Schneider.

“The only new thing was the idea of the butter. It was this, I learned many years later, that upset Maria, and not the violence that was in the scene and was envisaged in the script of the film,” he said.

“It is both consoling and distressing that anyone could be so naive to believe that what happens on the cinema screen actually takes place,” he said of viewers.

Schneider, who suffered drug addiction and depression before her 2011 death, said four years earlier she had felt “a little raped” during the scene and was profoundly angry about it for years afterwards.

When asked in 2013 how he would like to be remembered, Bertolucci told AFP:

I don’t care.

“I think my movies are there, people can see them,” he said at a presentation of a 3D version of The Last Emperor to mark the 25th anniversary of its international release.

“And sometimes I laugh, thinking I will be remembered more as a talent scout of young girls than as a film director,” he said.

The list of starlets he discovered includes Dominique Sanda in The Conformist in 1970s, the passionate Schneider in Last Tango in Paris (1972), Liv Tyler in 1996′s Stealing Beauty and Eva Green, who made her screen debut in The Dreamers in 2003.

- © AFP 2018