Stage and film director, born in Milan, N Italy. An early interest in music and the theatre led him to stage designing and the production of opera and ballet. A short spell as assistant to Jean Renoir turned his attention to the cinema. His first film, Ossessione (1942, Obsession), took Italy by storm, with its strict realism and concern with social problems. Later films included La terra trema (1947, The Earth Trembles), Il gattopardo (1963, The Leopard), and Morte a Venezia (1971, Death in Venice).
Luchino Visconti, Duke of Modrone (November 2, 1906 - March 17, 1976) was an Italian theatre and cinema director and writer, best known for films such as The Leopard (1963).
Early life
Born into a noble and wealthy family (one of the richest of northern Italy), in Milan.
Film career
In 1936, at the age of 30, he went to Paris and began his filmmaking career as third assistant director in Jean Renoir's Une partie de campagne (1936), thanks to the intercession of a common friend, Coco Chanel.
Together with Roberto Rossellini, Visconti joined the salotto of Vittorio Mussolini (the son of Benito, at the time the national arbitrator for cinema and other arts) and here presumably met also Federico Fellini. With Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli and Giuseppe De Santis he wrote the screenplay for his first film as director: Ossessione (Obsession) (1943), the first neorealist movie and an adaptation of the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Visconti was one Neo-realist director who was able to continue working throughout the 1950’s, although he veered away from the neorealist path with his 1954 film, Senso, which was also filmed in Technicolor. Nowell-Smith calls this film the “most Viscontian” of all Visconti’s films
Visconti was also a celebrated theatre director.
He returned to neorealism one more time in the 1960 film, Rocco and his Brothers, about southern Italians who migrate to Milan hoping to find financial stability. Biographer Geoffrey Nowell-Smith said, “Visconti without neorealism is like Lang without expressionism and Eisenstein without formalism…”
Throughout the 1960’s, Visconti’s films became more personal.
This film was distributed throughout America and England as well, but in the process Twentieth-Century Fox scaled it down, with important scenes completely deleted.
It was not until his 1969 film, The Damned, that Visconti received a nomination for an Academy Award, for Best Screenplay. The film, one of Visconti's best-known works, is about a German industrialist family that slowly begins to disintegrate during World War II.
Visconti's final film was The Innocent (1976), which has the reoccurring theme of infidelity and betrayal.
Personal life
Visconti made no secret of his bisexuality.
Death
Visconti died in Rome of a stroke at the age of 69. Cain's 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice) Giorni di Gloria (1945) La Terra trema (1950) Appunti su un fatto di cronaca (1951) Bellissima (1951) Senso (Livia, 1954) Le notti bianche (White Nights, 1957) Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960) Boccaccio '70 (1961, based on Boccaccio's Decameron) Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963 - based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel Il Gattopardo) Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa (Sandra of a Thousand Delights, 1965) Lo Straniero (1967 - based on Albert Camus' novel L'Étranger) La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969) Alla ricerca di Tadzio (TV movie, 1970) Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971 - Based on Thomas Mann's novel) Ludwig (1972) Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece, 1974) L'Innocente (The Innocent) (1976)
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