Vittorio Gassman

Vittorio Gassman (1922-2000), Italian actor in theatre, films, and television. Gassman was born in Genoa, the son of an Austrian father and an Italian mother. After studying at the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome and, from 1943 onward, acting in several plays, he made his first film appearance in Preludio d’Amore (1946; Prelude to Love). In 1952 he married the American actress Shelley Winters and began appearing in American films. The marriage ended two years later, but Gassman’s sporadic international film career continued, perhaps most notably in War and Peace (1956) by King Vidor and in A Wedding (1978) and Quintet (1979), both by Robert Altman.

Gassman increasingly tended to appear in comic rather than dramatic roles in his numerous Italian films, 15 of which were directed by Dino Risi, including Profumo di Donna (1974; Scent of a Woman), for which Gassman won the Best Actor award at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. He also directed films himself, including Kean (1956), co-directed with Francesco Rosi, in which he played the English stage actor Edmund Kean. Gassman continued to work in other media, appearing on Italian television, establishing a theatre company, Teatro Popolare Italiano, in 1960, and publishing his memoirs and a book of verse.

In the 1990s, Gassman showed little sign of slowing down. He worked with some of Europe’s most distinguished directors, including André Delvaux, Krzysztof Zanussi, and Ettore Scola. While based in Europe, he made the occasional cameo appearance in Hollywood films such as Paul Mazursky’s Tempest (1982) and Barry Levinson’s Sleepers (1996).