Vittorio De Sica (/də ˈsiːkə/ də SEE-kə, Italian: [vitˈtɔːrjo de ˈsiːka]; 7 July 1901 – 13 November 1974) was an Italian film director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement.
Vittorio De Sica
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De Sica in 1959
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| Born | (1901-07-07)7 July 1901
Sora, Lazio, Kingdom of Italy
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| Died | 13 November 1974(1974-11-13) (aged 73)
Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
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| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1917–1974 |
| Spouses |
(m. 1937; div. 1954) (m. 1968) |
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Widely considered one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, four of the films he directed won Academy Awards: Sciuscià and Bicycle Thieves (honorary), while Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and Il giardino dei Finzi Contini won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Indeed, the great critical success of Sciuscià (the first foreign film to be so recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) and Bicycle Thieves helped establish the permanent Best Foreign Film Award. These two films are considered part of the canon of classic cinema.[1] Bicycle Thieves was deemed the greatest film of all time by Sight & Sound magazine's poll of filmmakers and critics in 1952,[2] and was cited by Turner Classic Movies as one of the 15 most influential films in cinema history.[3]
De Sica was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing Major Rinaldi in American director Charles Vidor's 1957 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a movie that was panned by critics and proved a box office flop. De Sica's acting was considered the highlight of the film.[4]
De Sica was born on 7 July 1901 in Sora, Lazio.[5] His father Umberto De Sica was from Giffoni Valle Piana, he was a journalist, and in the later years he worked for the Bank of Italy.[6] Teresa Manfredi, his mother, had Neapolitan origins. De Sica was baptised in the church of San Giovanni Battista in Sora under the name Vittorio Domenico Stanislao Gaetano Sorano De Sica. He had a very close relationship with his father and later dedicated to him the film Umberto D. The first interest in cinema sparked in Vittorio due to his father's occasional performances in silent movies: he filled in for the pianists. As an adult, Vittorio De Sica described their family state in his early years as the 'tragic and aristocratic poverty'.[7][6]
In 1914, the family moved to Naples. Upon the outbreak of the First World War, they moved to Florence. Eventually, they settled down in Rome. At the age of 15, De Sica started performing as an actor in amateur plays staged in hospitals for the recovering soldiers. He started studying to become an accountant when in 1917 through a family friend Edoardo Bencivenga he got a small part in the Alfredo De Antoni film The Clemenceau Affair.[8]
De Sica laureated in 1923. Described as strikingly handsome, already in the early 1920s he began his career as a theatre actor and joined Tatiana Pavlova's theatre company in 1923.[6] With Pavlova he worked for two years and toured South America. In 1925, he joined the company of Italia Almirante Manzini and was soon referred to as the second best in her troupe. Two years later he joined the company of Luigi Almirante, Sergio Tofano and Giuditta Rissone. De Sica debuted as a romantic protagonist in Ferenc Molnár's Gli occhi azzurri dell'imperatore. During that period he met Umberto Melnati, an actor from Livorno, with whom formed a successful comic duo and collaborated in many films and theater plays.[9][10] On 3 October 1930, they premiered in Teatro Manzoni with L'isola meravigliosa based on Ugo Betti's play. They were soon spotted by Mario Mattoli who was then an impresario in Teatro Mazoni. Mattoli was impressed by the quality of their rehearsals and offered to join his company Za-Bum. With Za-Bum, De Sica, Rissone and Melnati played in Una segretaria per tutti, Un cattivo soggetto, Il signore desidera?, Lisetta, and many other revues written by Mattoli and Luciano Ramo. The duo became famous on the national level after the success of radio-sketch Düra minga, dura no and a popular song Lodovico sei dolce come un fico sang by De Sica.[11]
In 1933, De Sica, Rissone, and Tofano founded their own company.[12] The period of Tofano-Rissone-De Sica was notable also due to De Sica's acquaintance to Aldo De Benedetti and Gherardo Gherardi, the screenwriters with whom he had a long and fruitful collaboration. Tofano-Rissone-De Sica performed mostly light comedies, but they also staged plays by Beaumarchais and worked with famous directors like Luchino Visconti. In 1936, the company was reformed into Rissone-De Sica-Melnati, and eventually disbanded in 1939. The play Due dozzine di rose scarlatte, written by Aldo De Benedetti, premiered on 11 March 1936, in Teatro Argentina. It is considered the best Italian comedy of the 1930s.[13]
In 1937, De Sica married Giuditta Rissone, around that time the duo with Melnati was ended. In 1940, the spouses reconciled with Tofano and founded the mutual company again, where all the management tasks were taken over by Tofano. Together they released a series of successful plays: La scuola della maldicenza (based on Richard Brinsley Sheridan), Ma non è una cosa seria written by Luigi Pirandello, Il paese delle vacanzebyUgo Betti, Liolà, etc.[14]
In 1945-46, he played in two spectacles directed by Alessandro Blasetti: Il tempo e la famiglia Conway written by John Boynton Priestley and Ma non è una cosa seriabyLuigi Pirandello. The season 1945-46 he spent playing in The Marriage of Figaro and collaborated with Luchino Visconti, Vivi Gioi and Nino Besozzi. In 1948-49 he acted in two new plays: The Time of Your Life and The Magnificent Cuckold written by Fernand Crommelynck and adapted by Mario Chiari. The Magnificent Cuckold became De Sica's last theatre performance after which he concentrated fully on cinema and TV projects. Between 1923 and 1949 De Sica took part in over 120 theatre performances.[15]
In the early years, De Sica combined his theatre and cinema careers: in the summer months he was engaged in filmmaking and spent the winters performing on stage.[11] In cinema, his first notable role was in 1932 Gli uomini, che mascalzoni directed by Mario Camerini. The song Parlami d'amore Mariù [it] became a hit and remained his signature song for many years.[12][16] In the 1930s his credits included many notable performances such as in I'll Give a Million (1935), Il signor Max (1937), Department Store (1939), Manon Lescaut. Between 1931 and 1940, he starred in and directed 23 productions.[17]
During 1934 in Verona, De Sica first met screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, for many years they would become the inseparable collaborators and created some of the most celebrated films of the neorealistic age, like Sciuscià (Shoeshine) and Bicycle Thieves (released as The Bicycle Thief in America), both directed by De Sica.[18][19]
In 1940, supported by producer Giuseppe Amato, De Sica debuted as a director and created Rose scarlatte.[12][20]
In 1944, De Sica received an invitation from Goebbels to make a film in Prague, but refused, using an offer from the Catholic Film Centre in Rome as an excuse.[21]
De Sica's 1946 drama Sciuscià won the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film in 1947. Despite the film's critical success, it failed in the Italian box office because the public craved easier films and mostly went to comedies.[citation needed] It was also heavily criticized by the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Correction. This alienation by the Italian authorities made it difficult for De Sica to finance his subsequent projects. To produce Bicycle Thieves, De Sica had to invest own money and rely on the support of several Italian businessmen. The film brought De Sica his second Oscar as well as multiple other awards and accolades, however, again the success in Italian box office was tepid. The relationship with the government remained bad, after the release of Umberto D. prime minister Giulio Andreotti sent De Sica a letter accusing him of 'rendering bad service for the country'.[22]
In 1951, De Sica co-authored (with Alberto Sordi) and played in Mamma Mia, What an Impression![23] In 1952, he played along Gina LollobrigidainIn Olden Days and then again in 1953 in the comedy Bread, Love and Dreams. De Sica's character, Marshal Antonio Carotenuto, immediately became the public's favourite. The film was an enormous success, it was nominated for Academy Awards and won the Silver Bear at Berlinale. It was followed with three sequels: Bread, Love and Jealousy (1954), Scandal in Sorrento (1955), and Bread, Love and Andalusia (1958).[24][25]
In 1959, De Sica appeared in the British television series The Four Just Men. In 1961, he starred in The Two Marshals alongside Totò.[26]
His passion for gambling was well known and because of it, he often lost large sums of money and accepted work that might not otherwise have interested him. He never kept his gambling a secret from anyone; in fact, he projected it on characters in his own movies, like Count Max (which he acted in but did not direct) and The Gold of Naples,[26] as well as in General Della Rovere, a film directed by Rossellini in which De Sica played the title role.[27]
In 1937 Vittorio De Sica married the actress Giuditta Rissone, who gave birth to their daughter, Emilia (1938-2021).[28] In 1942, on the set of Un garibaldino al convento, he met Spanish actress María Mercader (cousin of Ramon Mercader, Leon Trotsky's assassin), with whom he started a relationship. De Sica never parted from his first family: he led a double family life, with double celebrations on holidays. It is said that, at Christmas and on New Year's Eve, he used to put back the clocks by two hours in Mercader's house so that he could make a toast at midnight with both families. Rissone agreed to keep up the facade of a marriage so as not to leave her daughter without a father. After finally divorcing Rissone in France in 1954, he married Mercader in 1959 in Mexico, but this union was not considered valid under Italian law. In 1968 he obtained French citizenship and married Mercader in Paris. Meanwhile, he had already had two sons with her: Manuel (1949-2014), a musician and a composer, and Christian (b. 1951), who would follow his father's path as an actor and director. Only when Christian was 18, the siblings found out about each other and started communication.[29][20][30] Christian's son and Vittorio's grandson Brando De Sica continued the dynasty and became an actor and film director.[31]
He was a Roman Catholic[32] and a communist.[33][34]
Vittorio De Sica died at 73 after surgery due to lung cancer at the Neuilly-sur-Seine hospital in Paris.[35]
Vittorio De Sica was given the Interfilm Grand Prix in 1971 by the Berlin International Film Festival.[36][37]
| English title | Original title | Notes | Released |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red Roses | Rose scarlatte | Co-director | 1940 |
| Maddalena, Zero for Conduct | Maddalena, zero in condotta | ||
| Do You Like Women Teresa Venerdi | 1941 | ||
| A Garibaldian in the Convent | Un garibaldino al convento | 1942 | |
| The Children Are Watching Us | I bambini ci guardano | 1944 | |
| The Gate of Heaven | La porta del cielo | 1945 | |
| Shoeshine | Sciuscià | Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Film (Special Award) | 1946 |
| Heart and Soul | Cuore | Co-director | 1948 |
| Bicycle Thieves | Ladri di biciclette | Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Film (Special Award) | |
| Miracle in Milan | Miracolo a Milano | 1951 | |
| Umberto D. | 1952 | ||
| Terminal Station | Stazione Termini | 1953 | |
| The Gold of Naples | L'oro di Napoli | 1954 | |
| The Roof | Il Tetto | 1956 | |
| Anna of Brooklyn | Anna di Brooklyn | Co-director | 1958 |
| Two Women | La Ciociara | 1960 | |
| The Last Judgment | Il Giudizio universale | 1961 | |
| The Condemned of Altona | I sequestrati di Altona | 1962 | |
| Boccaccio '70 | Short film – segment La riffa | ||
| Il Boom | 1963 | ||
| Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow | Ieri, oggi e domani | Academy Award Winner, Best Foreign Film[41] | |
| Marriage Italian-Style | Matrimonio all'italiana | Academy Award Nominee, Best Foreign Film[42] | 1964 |
| Un monde nouveau | 1966 | ||
| After the Fox | Caccia alla volpe | ||
| Woman Times Seven | Sette Volte Donna | 1967 | |
| The Witches | Le streghe | Short film – segment Una sera come le altre | |
| A Place for Lovers | Amanti | 1968 | |
| Sunflower | I Girasoli | 1970 | |
| The Garden of the Finzi-Continis | Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini | Academy Award Winner, Best Foreign Film[43] | |
| The Couples | Le coppie | Short film – segment Il Leone | |
| From Referendum to the Constitution: 2 June | Dal referendum alla costituzione: Il 2 giugno | Documentary | 1971 |
| The Knights of Malta | I Cavalieri di Malta | ||
| We'll Call Him Andrea | Lo chiameremo Andrea | 1972 | |
| A Brief Vacation | Una breve vacanza | 1973 | |
| The Voyage | Il viaggio | 1974 | |
Note: on many sources, Fontana di TrevibyCarlo Campogalliani (1960) and La bonne soupebyRobert Thomas (1964) are included but de Sica does not appear in those films.
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"They were both communists, both Cesare and De Sica," his son says.
