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so, the truths Antonioni had taught her
endured.
“In my life the camera has looked at
me even more than my mother has,”
said Vitti. “But the camera I can never
talk to. It never answers... the camera
is dangerous because it is a witness. It
takes everything, has many faces. A
camera, you know, once you are con-
scious of it, changes everything.”
She was born Maria Luisa Ceciarelli
in Rome in 1931, although she spent
much of her childhood in Messina,
where her father worked as a customs
official. It was not a period that she
looked back on with much fondness.
Her parents were strict and, unlike
her two brothers, she was rarely al-
lowed to do what she liked, let alone
leave the house unsupervised. By the
age of 12 she had already decided not to
marry or to have children of her own.
The advent of war brought further
troubles, although she discovered a tal-
ent for theatre as she made up stories
with puppets to distract her brothers
from the sound of bombing.When she was 18 her parents took her
siblings to the New World to try to
make their fortunes. She meanwhile
enrolled at Silvio D’Amico’s prestigious
drama school in Rome, and by the time
they returned she had become a star.
She changed her name on the advice
of one of her teachers, adopting half of
her mother’s maiden name, Vittiglia,
and taking Monica (a rare name in Italy
and regarded as German) from a book
that she was reading.
At first, she concentrated on the
stage, beginning to find small film parts
in the late 1950s. Her unusually deep
voice brought her dubbing work, for in-
stance in Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti
(1958) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accatto-
ne (1961).
Her break-up with Antonioni liberat-
ed her, as did arguably the critical fail-
ure of the one attempt to make her a
Hollywood star, Joseph Losey’s campy
adaptation of Modesty Blaise (1966),
which also featured Dirk Bogarde and
Terence Stamp.
Although Vitti was, as always, a strik-“I am three dangerous things,” reflected
Monica Vitti in 1977, “a woman, an
actress and not married, so I suppose
I’ll work until I’m 90.” Had it not been
for the early onset of dementia in her
sixties, no doubt her prediction would
have come true.
For even 30 years after her last ap-
pearance on the screen, she was regard-
ed in Italy as her generation’s most ver-
satile actress, and while she was never
perhaps a genuine international star,
her most celebrated roles, notably in
the avant-garde films of Michelangelo
Antonioni, made her an enigmatic em-
blem of modern European cinema.
She became the director’s muse after
he sat behind her at a screening and
admired her neck, telling her that she
should go into films. Soon she had
thrown over her architect fiancé, joined
Antonioni’s acting company, and been
cast as the lead in L’Avventura (1960),
the study of a woman’s mysterious
disappearance, which was to make both
their reputations.
When it was initially shown at Can-
nes, it was met with incomprehension
and howls of laughter, which caused
Vitti to run out in tears. Sixty years on,
Antonioni’s deliberately obscure cine-
ma can still provoke and baffle. Never-
theless, his fellow film-makers and crit-
ics, led by Roberto Rossellini, grasped
at once that its theme of alienation and
its interest in interior emotion was both
radical and modern.
Their support led to it winning the
special jury prize. With her husky voice,
aquiline looks — she hated being pho-
tographed in profile — and strikingly
luxuriant hair, Vitti suddenly found
herself a star, albeit a very different-
looking Italian one to the likes of
Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida.
Vitti seemed to represent a cool new
form of femininity for a new decade,
albeit one who on screen at least was
dissatisfied with what life offered. Over
another three films — “the quartet of
non-communication” as they are
known in Italian — Antonioni ex-
plored through Vitti the different facets
of the contemporary woman and her
relationships.
In L’Avventura, she had been torn
between her loyalty to her missing
friend and her desire for the woman’s
now available boyfriend. In La notte
(1961), with Jeanne Moreau and Mar-
cello Mastroianni, she was a target for
seduction, in L’eclisse (1962), with Alain
Delon, a hard-to-read beauty, and in Il
deserto rosso (1964), with Richard Har-
ris — Antonioni’s first film in colour
—an ever more unbalanced neurotic.
By the middle of the 1960s, however,
her relationship with Antonioni had
run its course. He went to London to
make Blow-Up, his first film without
her, although for many years thereafter
they continued to live in adjacent flats
in Rome.
This gave her room to breathe, and to
make another kind of cinema, which
revealed a lustier, earthier actress than
was apparent from her early films. Even
‘In my life the camera has
looked at me even more
than my mother has’
ing presence in the film, she was never
convinced that her English was good
enough for international audiences,
and she retreated to Italy. There, to the
surprise of all, she revealed herself to be
a natural comedienne.
Neo-realism had mutated into social
comedy, but this was dominated by
male actors. In a string of hit films, little
seen beyond Italy, Vitti more than held
her own with the pick of these, among
them Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman,
Ugo Tognazzi and Mastroianni. Argua-
bly only Mariangela Melato among ac-
tresses of her era was able to achieve a
similar feat.
The most successful of her comedies,
both critically and at the box office, was
La ragazza con pistola (The girl with a
Pistol) in 1968. The film’s title was often
used by the press thereafter as a sobri-
quet for Vitti, seeming to capture as it
did her spiritedness. In it, she played a
young Sicilian woman dishonoured by
a suitor who follows him to Britain to
get her revenge.
Thereafter, she played the full range
of Italian womanhood, not disdaining
to scruff up her
looks if it made
things funni-
er. “She al-
ways knew
what she had
to do,” ob-
served Moni-
celli. “There
were no games
about getting
into character,
she was an
actress — calculat-
ing the timings, the
position of the
cameras, the lightand the shadows, nothing escaped her.”
A particular highlight were her films
with Sordi, such as Amore mio aiutami
(1969) and Le Coppie (1970), with the
two often cast as mutually unhappy
spouses at a time when divorce was still
prohibited in Italy. In Polvere di stelle
(1973), the pair played performers who
enjoy an unexpected theatrical tri-
umph in the heady days at the war’s
end, only for success to fade. The role
brought Vitti one of her five David di
Donatello awards, the Italian equiva-
lent of a Bafta.
Perhaps at her peak in this period,
Vitti’s range allowed her to shine in very
different parts. Ettore Scola’s Dramma
della gelosia (1970), with Mastroianni
and Giancarlo Giannini, was social
commentary, with the liberated Vitti
now asserting the male privilege
of choosing her partners. In L’anatra
all’arancia (1975), based on a play by
William Douglas-Home, she was no
less convincing as a well-to-do bour-
geois wife in a modern comedy of man-
ners and midlife crisis.
She made her second and last English
language film, An Almost Perfect Affair,
with Keith Carradine, in 1979. Reputed-
ly her fear of flying put paid to plans to
publicise the film, and in the following
decade she faded from the screen,
concentrating on stage roles, television
and teaching.
In 1990 she made her only film as a
director, Scandalo segreto, in which she
starred alongside Elliott Gould. She
made it clear that she would not repeat
the exercise and concentrated instead
on writing her memoirs. The second
volume of these, Il letto è una rosa (Bed
is Like a Rose, 1995), became a set text in
Italian schools, despite (or perhaps
because of) its frank reminiscences
about sex and sexuality.
“Sensuality is like a feather held
against your lips with a light breath,”
she wrote. “If you suddenly sneeze it
will fly out of the window, and then it’s
thank you and goodnight.”
Vitti had the experience of reading
her premature obituary in 1988 when
Le Monde reported that she had com-
mitted suicide. She laughed off the
gaffe. Yet from the mid-1990s, she
began to be seen rarely at events. Her
partner of some ten years, the screen-
writer and composer Roberto Russo,
who was a decade and a half her junior,
subsequently announced that she had
been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s
disease. The pair were married in 2000
and her last public appearance came
two years later.
Seven years earlier, she had been
given a career award at the Venice film
festival. “Now I can fly,” she had said as
she accepted it. “I
started at 15, acting
is my life. It’s like
trying to keep play-
ing, to reconquer
life each day. If
there’s a job that I
know how to do well,
it’s cinema.”Monica Vitti, actress, was
born on November 3,- She died from com-
plications of Alzheimer’s
disease on February 2,
2022, aged 90
Vitti at the Venice film festival in 1964, with Antonioni and in la Notte (1961). The
1966 film Modesty Blaise, below, was an attempt to make her a Hollywood starObituaries
Monica Vitti
Cool, husky-voiced and ‘dangerous’ Italian actress who made her name in the avant-garde films of Michelangelo Antonioni
KEYSTONE/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGESPathologist known as ‘the
Joan Collins of medicine’
Professor Kristin Henry
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