“You can well imagine how much I loved Lina Wertmuller,” she tweeted. Laraine Newman, the former “Saturday Night Live” star and a founding member of the Groundlings improv troupe, was among those who paid their respects Thursday. “When this could happen, and somebody didn’t want to support one of ideas, I would move on and go to another producer or go find another way to make the film.” “Because I have been able to be myself, I’ve been able to make the kind of films that I did,” she said in 2019. But some projects, such as 1999’s “Ferdinando and Carolina,” have earned delayed admiration. In the 1970s, Italian film director Lina Wertmuller became the first woman ever nominated for an Academy Award for best director and was hailed as the next Fellini for her powerful political comedies.Īfter her ’70s golden age, critics and awards officials, for reasons that were “a mystery” to Wertmüller, largely turned their backs on her later works. “I don’t see much of a difference between Europe and America.”Īmbition still burns in ‘70s firebrand Lina Wertmuller “Everybody conquers the space that they manage to conquer,” she told The Times in 2019. She also worked almost exclusively in the Italian film industry but believed that the experiences of women striving to break the mold were universal. Wertmüller worked closely with her husband, Enrico Job, a set designer who died in 2008, on all her successful films and called him her “best critic.” She served as a member of the Venice Film Festival jury in 1988 and as the director of Italy’s film acting school.
With unflinching ambition and satirical social commentary, the often misunderstood auteur took the cinema world by storm with the politically charged films “The Basilisks” (1963), “The Seduction of Mimi” (1972), “Love and Anarchy” (1973) and “Swept Away” (1974). “My experience with him as an assistant on ‘8½' gave me an incredible chance to open my mind and to understand how beautiful my job can be.” “He was really a magician to me,” she said in a 2017 Criterion interview. Wertmüller began her filmmaking career when Mastroianni introduced her to famed Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, whom she assisted on 1963’s “8½.” She observed his way of moviemaking and admired his “profoundly nonconformist” style, as well as his freedom to make decisions and changes on a whim. She then toured Europe with Maria Signorelli’s puppet troupe. Going against her family’s desire that she study law, Wertmüller instead went to drama school at Rome’s Theatre Academy, where she acted, wrote and directed plays. The Holocaust period piece starring Wertmüller’s longtime muse, Giancarlo Giannini, was nominated for four Oscars in 1977: screenplay, foreign language film, directing for Wertmüller and acting for Giannini. The Rome-born nonconformist filmmaker made Academy Awards history for her work on the 1975 film “Seven Beauties” (released in Italian as “Pasqualino Settebellezze”). “Italy mourns the death of Lina Wertmüller, a director who, with her class and unmistakable style, has left a lasting mark in our cinema and in the world,” Culture Minister Dario Franceschini said in a statement posted online, praising her “long and intense career, delivering works to which each of us will remain forever attached.” The pioneering director died Thursday at her home in Rome surrounded by her family, according to the La Presse news agency and the Italian Ministry of Culture. Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmüller, the first Oscar-nominated female director, whose work tackled political and social issues, has died.
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