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 theatreactor 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 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. Overall in 1931-940, 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 fortunately managed to refuse, using as an excuse an offer from the Catholic Film Centre in Rome.[21]
De Sica's 1946 drama Sciuscià won the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film in 1947, however, in Italy it failed in the box office as the public craved easier films and mostly went to comedies, and was heavily criticized by the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Correction. This alienation of the authorities resulted in major difficulty with financing following 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]
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]
^"Famous Catholics". www.adherents.com. Archived from the original on 14 February 2012. Retrieved 21 February 2012.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
^Ariela Bankier (22 April 2010). "All About My Father". Haaretz. Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. Retrieved 26 June 2021. "They were both communists, both Cesare and De Sica," his son says.
^Gino Moliterno (2000). Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture. Routledge. p. 409. ISBN9780415145848.
