59 Fun Facts About Marcello Mastroianni

What job does Mastroianni's character hold in La Dolce Vita?

A gossip journalist. He chronicles the scandals of Rome's café society while a friend urges him to finish the serious book he keeps putting off, and he never does.

Which Swedish actress plays Sylvia, the visiting film star Mastroianni's character pursues around Rome in La Dolce Vita?

Anita Ekberg. The role fixed her image for life: she settled in Italy, and decades later she was still living in a villa in the countryside outside Rome.

In which notorious 1973 film do Mastroianni and three friends gather to eat themselves to death?

La Grande Bouffe. Marco Ferreri's satire was jeered at the 1973 Cannes festival in one of its biggest scandals, yet it left with the international critics' prize.

Mastroianni played Meursault in a 1967 film of The Stranger, a novel by which French writer?

Albert Camus. Mastroianni plays Meursault, who shoots a man on an Algiers beach and finds the court condemns him less for the killing than for not weeping at his mother's funeral.

What business did Mastroianni's father run?

A carpentry shop. His father, a cabinetmaker, put Marcello to work there as a boy; he later went blind from diabetes and had to ask his wife what was happening on cinema screens.

What happened to Mastroianni during World War II?

He escaped a German prison camp and hid in Venice. Put to work drawing maps, he was sent on to a German-run labour camp in the Alps, got away and sat out the war in near poverty.

In which 1958 caper comedy does Mastroianni help bungle a pawn-shop burglary?

Big Deal on Madonna Street. After breaking through the wrong wall, the gang lands in a kitchen instead of the pawnshop, gives up on the safe and sits down to eat the pasta and chickpeas.

What is the name of Mastroianni's character in La Dolce Vita?

Marcello Rubini. The film's first producer wanted Paul Newman for the part, but Fellini held out for Mastroianni, telling him he needed an ordinary face.

In which Roman fountain does Mastroianni wade in a famous night scene from La Dolce Vita?

The Trevi Fountain. When he died in 1996, Rome shut off its water, dimmed its lights and hung it with black drapes in his honour.

Which everyday word comes from the name of a character in La Dolce Vita?

Paparazzi. The film's pushy news photographer is called Paparazzo, a surname Fellini is said to have lifted from George Gissing's travel book By the Ionian Sea.

Which prize did La Dolce Vita win at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival?

The Palme d'Or. It won at Cannes only three months after Italian politicians had lined up to attack the film at home, and some countries went on to ban it outright.

What is the name of the film director Mastroianni plays in 8½?

Guido Anselmi. In a big hat and dark-rimmed glasses he was so plainly standing in for Fellini that he was known from then on as the director's alter ego.

Besides costume design, which Oscar did 8½ win?

Best Foreign Language Film. Fellini had lost the thread of his film and was about to abandon it when the answer came to him: make it about a director who can no longer remember the film he wanted to make.

The title of Mastroianni's film Allonsanfàn mangles the opening words of which anthem?

La Marseillaise. It opens 'Allons enfants'; in the 1974 film Mastroianni plays an aristocrat in Restoration Italy who, weary of the cause, keeps betraying his fellow revolutionaries.

Which Hollywood star plays the American businessman who visits Naples opposite Mastroianni in Macaroni (1985)?

Jack Lemmon. Like Mastroianni, he won Best Actor at Cannes twice; here his burnt-out executive returns to the city of a wartime romance and is won over by her brother's sprawling family.

For which 1970 film opposite Monica Vitti did Mastroianni win his first Cannes prize?

The Pizza Triangle. His Roman bricklayer loses his flower-seller lover to a young pizza cook, and most of the story is told as testimony at the trial that follows.

What scheme does Mastroianni's Sicilian baron hatch to be rid of his wife in Divorce Italian Style?

Push her into an affair. Divorce was illegal in Italy, but a husband who killed an unfaithful wife to save his honour could expect a light sentence, so he sets out to find her a lover.

Who directed Divorce Italian Style?

Pietro Germi. Until then he was known for sober social dramas; this black farce marked his switch to satire and won him an Oscar for the script.

A Special Day is set in Rome on the day of which 1938 event?

Hitler's visit to Mussolini. Nearly everyone in the vast apartment block goes off to cheer the parade, and the two neighbours left behind meet when her pet bird escapes to his window.

Who directed A Special Day?

Ettore Scola. He confined the whole story to one real 1930s housing complex in Rome, the Palazzo Federici, and went back to film there again almost twenty years later.

Dark Eyes (1987) was inspired by stories by which Russian writer?

Anton Chekhov. It was a homecoming: in the 1950s Mastroianni had made his name on stage in Three Sisters and as the doctor Astrov in Uncle Vanya, decades before this film wove several of the stories together.

Who directed Dark Eyes?

Nikita Mikhalkov. His film has Mastroianni tell a stranger on a ship the story of his one great love, and only at the end do we learn the once-rich charmer is now the ship's waiter.

Which director paired Loren and Mastroianni in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and Marriage Italian Style?

Vittorio De Sica. Two decades earlier, a teenage Mastroianni had slipped into De Sica's wartime drama The Children Are Watching Us as an uncredited extra.

In Marriage Italian Style, how does Loren's character trick Mastroianni's into marrying her?

Fakes her deathbed. His long-time mistress stages a deathbed wedding, then springs out of bed as his lawful wife, a plot taken from Eduardo De Filippo's play Filumena Marturano.

In which city was La Notte (1961), starring Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, filmed?

Milan. The film trails a successful novelist and his wife through one day and night in the booming city, from a sick friend's hospital bed to a millionaire's all-night party, as their marriage quietly gives out.

White Nights (1957), starring Mastroianni, adapts a story by which Russian author?

Fyodor Dostoevsky. The film moves his St Petersburg story to the Italian port of Livorno, where a lonely newcomer falls for a woman who waits on a canal bridge for a lover gone a year.

In a late Fellini film, Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina play ageing impersonators of which Hollywood duo?

Astaire and Rogers. Ginger Rogers took the film's title, Ginger and Fred, to the American courts, claiming it traded on her name, and lost.

What is the name of Mastroianni's character in Fellini's City of Women?

Snàporaz. He follows a stranger off a train and blunders into a hotel hosting a feminist convention, where the dream turns into a trial of his whole attitude to women.

In which 1965 science-fiction film does Mastroianni star opposite Ursula Andress?

The 10th Victim. In its future, a worldwide game called the Big Hunt licenses players to kill one another, hunter against victim, as the state's substitute for war.

In Everybody's Fine (1990), whom does Mastroianni's Sicilian cross Italy to surprise?

His children. He named all five after opera characters and finds each hiding a disappointing life; Hollywood remade the story in 2009 with Robert De Niro in his role.

Where was Sunflower (1970), with Loren searching for Mastroianni, largely shot?

The Soviet Union. Her husband goes missing on the Russian front, so after the war she travels east to look for him, and the film was shot where its story leads.

Which Robert Altman film reunited Mastroianni and Loren in 1994?

Prêt-à-Porter. In it the two replay, thirty years on, her famous striptease from Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, except that this time his character falls asleep.

In which city is Mastroianni's 1995 film According to Pereira set?

Lisbon. In 1938 his ageing, apolitical culture editor keeps his head down under Salazar's dictatorship until a young anti-fascist he helps forces him to take a side.

Which Greek director cast Mastroianni as a beekeeper in a 1986 art film?

Theo Angelopoulos. Mastroianni plays a just-retired schoolteacher who sets off across Greece with his beehives after his daughter's wedding, and the two men made a second film together five years later.

Which American actress did Mastroianni call 'the woman I loved the most'?

Faye Dunaway. They fell in love making A Place for Lovers; she wanted marriage and children, but he would not divorce his wife, and in the end she left him.

With which French actress did Mastroianni have his daughter Chiara in 1972?

Catherine Deneuve. They made four films together in those years; in one, Jacques Demy's comedy A Slightly Pregnant Man, it is his character who is told he is expecting a baby.

Which actress did Mastroianni marry as a young man and never divorce?

Flora Carabella. They lived apart for most of the marriage because of his affairs, yet he refused every call to divorce, and they were still husband and wife when he died.

In which 1996 film did Mastroianni act alongside his daughter Chiara?

Three Lives and Only One Death. Raúl Ruiz's puzzle film has him play several men at once, among them a Sorbonne professor who walks away from his lectern to live as a beggar.

Mastroianni was buried in Rome, but in which city had he died days earlier?

Paris. He had made the city his second home in the 1970s, and thousands packed the church of St Sulpice and the square outside for his funeral before the coffin was flown to Rome.

In a 1960s stage musical in Rome, Mastroianni sang and danced as which famous Italian?

Rudolph Valentino. The show, Ciao, Rudy, played to full houses, but Mastroianni paid a heavy penalty to break his contract and leave it.

Anna Maria Tatò, who filmed the documentary Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember, was Mastroianni's what?

His last partner. She filmed him between takes on his final picture as he talked his way through his whole life, a spoken self-portrait more than three hours long.

Which director cast Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau as an estranged couple in La Notte?

Michelangelo Antonioni. In the famous last scene the wife reads aloud a tender old love letter, and the husband no longer recognises it as one he wrote himself.

For which 1989 film did Mastroianni win the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice?

What Time Is It? He shared the prize with Massimo Troisi, who plays the conscript son he comes to spend one awkward day with in the port town of Civitavecchia.

Which British director cast Mastroianni as an exiled prince in Leo the Last (1970)?

John Boorman. He won best director at Cannes for it; Mastroianni's shy birdwatcher, back in his father's London house, turns his spyglass on the slum next door and ends up taking his neighbours' side.

Which label did the press pin on Mastroianni after La Dolce Vita, to his lasting annoyance?

The Latin lover. He fought the tag for decades, once telling American television "I am not a sex addict", and insisting he had only "a little peasant face" and skinny legs.

Which Hollywood star plays the Queens widow Mastroianni's character courts in Used People (1992)?

Shirley MacLaine. It was a rare American film for him: he had shunned Hollywood for decades and took Hollywood-financed roles only late in his career.

Which star played the German police chief opposite Mastroianni's priest in Massacre in Rome (1973)?

Richard Burton. He plays Herbert Kappler, the officer who had 335 prisoners and civilians shot in the Ardeatine caves in 1944 in reprisal for a partisan bombing.

Which relative of Mastroianni, a leading film editor, acted beside him in Scipio the African (1971)?

His brother. Ruggero Mastroianni, who edited Fellini's films for over twenty years, stepped in front of the camera as Scipio Asiaticus, so the two brothers play two brothers.

Which French star played opposite Mastroianni in Louis Malle's A Very Private Affair (1962)?

Brigitte Bardot. Malle built the film on her own life, casting her as a star so hounded by the press and her fans that she has no private life left.

Mastroianni's uncle Umberto won international fame in which art?

Sculpture. Umberto fought with the partisans in the war, an experience he carried into his abstract monuments, and in 1989 he won Japan's first Praemium Imperiale for sculpture.

In Il bell'Antonio (1960), what secret destroys the marriage of Mastroianni's handsome young Sicilian?

He is impotent. His bride's family has the unconsummated marriage annulled and marries her to a duke, a public humiliation for a man the town had taken for a Don Juan.

Which newspaper attacked La Dolce Vita in 1960 under the headline 'La sconcia vita', the filthy life?

L'Osservatore Romano. The Vatican's daily ran a string of attacks on the film, pieces later attributed to Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, a future president of Italy.

Which Roman street of pavement cafés did designer Piero Gherardi rebuild in the studio for La Dolce Vita?

Via Veneto. Gherardi rebuilt a stretch of the street at Cinecittà, exact in every detail but one: the copy was flat, not sloping.

In which country did the dying Mastroianni shoot his final film, Voyage to the Beginning of the World?

Portugal. Director Manoel de Oliveira cast him as an old film-maker called Manoel going back to the places of his childhood, so in his last role he stood in for the man behind the camera.

Mastroianni's 8½ takes its odd title from its director's running count of what?

Films he had made. The director tallied his features and shorts to date, the shorts not counting as whole films, and made this one number eight and a half; its working title had been The Beautiful Confusion.

Which composer wrote the circus marches and fanfares heard in 8½?

Nino Rota later scored The Godfather, but its Oscar nomination was withdrawn when the Academy learned he had reused a theme from Fortunella, a 1958 Italian film.

Which actress, the heiress Maddalena in La Dolce Vita, returned as Mastroianni's estranged wife in 8½?

Anouk Aimée played Luisa, who declares the marriage over when she sees how bitterly her husband has written her into his film; she was among the first cast, kept on from La Dolce Vita.

Which Broadway musical, filmed in 2009 with Daniel Day-Lewis in Mastroianni's role, is based on 8½?

Nine. The show turned Mastroianni's film director into the lone grown man on a stage full of the women in his life, and won the 1982 Tony Award for best musical.

Claudia Cardinale filmed 8½ with Mastroianni while also shooting which other 1963 film?

The Leopard. Cardinale worked on both films at once, and 8½ was the first in which audiences heard her own husky voice: until then producers had always had her dubbed.