Marcello Mastroianni was born in 1924, in Fontana Liri, Italy, but soon his family moved to Turin and then Rome. During WW2 he was sent to a German prison camp, but he managed to escape and hide in Venice. In 1945 he started working for the Italian department of "Eagle Lion Films" in Rome and joined a drama club, where he was discovered by director Luchino Visconti. He made his "official" movie debut in the film Miserabili, I and The Miller's Beautiful Wife. In 1957 Visconti gave him the starring part in his Fyodor Dostoyevsky adaptation Notti bianche, Le and in 1958 he was fine as a little thief in Mario Monicelli's comedy Big Deal. But his real breakthrough came in 1960, when Federico Fellini cast him as an attractive, weary-eyed journalist of the Rome jet-set in Dolce vita, La; that film was the genesis of his "Latin lover" persona, which Mastroianni himself often denied by accepting parts of passive and sensitive men. He would again work with Fellini in several major films, like the exquisite Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (as a movie director who finds himself at a point of crisis) and the touching Ginger and Fred (as an old entertainer who appears in a TV show). He also appeared as a tired novelist with marital problems in Michelangelo Antonioni's Notte, La, as an impotent young man in Mauro Bolognini's _Bell' Antonio, Il (1960)_ , as an exiled prince in John Boorman's Leo the Last, as a traitor in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Allonsanfan and as a sensitive homosexual in love with a housewife in Ettore Scola's A Special Day. During the last decade of his life he worked with directors, like Theo Angelopoulos, Bertrand Blier and Raoul Ruiz, who gave him three excellent parts in Three Lives and Only One Death. He died of pancreatic cancer in 1996.


Father of Chiara Mastroianni and Barbara Mastroianni From 1971 to 1975 he had an intense relationship with french actress Catherine Deneuve. She was at his bedside when he died, along with their daughter, Chiara Mastroianni. Uncle of Federica Mastroianni. Since 1998, a "Marcello Mastroianni Award" is given to the best "first time" young actor/actress at the Venice Film Festival. During his studies at the Centro Universiatio Teatrale, he got to know Luchino Visconti, who gave him a role in "Un Tram che si chiama desiderio" (A Streetcar Named Desire) under his direction. At that time, he also met Anna Magnani and Federico Fellini. Visited the genius Sergei Parajanov at his house in Tbilisi, Georgia, Soviet Union in 1980s and then, in July of 1990, along with Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra and Bernardo Bertolucci wrote: "With the death of Sergei Paradjanov cinema lost one of its magicians".