Film School: The Late Career of Marcello Mastroianni

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However hard a writer might try, it’s impossible to do justice to the career of Marcello Mastroianni in a few thousand words. 

It may have taken him until the comparatively mature age of 35 to become a big star, but once he hit those heady heights, he never stopped working—by the time of his death, at the too-young age of 72, he’d made almost 150 movies. Over this month of Film School, we haven’t even had time to dive into his five films with long-term partner Catherine Deneuve, or his dalliances with the very Italian genres of giallo and poliziotteschi, or the handful of English-language features in which he appeared during the ‘60s and ‘70s. The man was too damn prolific!

And unlike many actors blessed with a career that spanned decades, there was no drop-off in quality as Marcello Mastroianni grew older. As we’ve discussed already, it’s not that every film he made was a work of art (in some cases, far from it). But during the final decade or so of his life, Mastroianni was as productive as ever, and just as committed to seeking out interesting projects and developing new fruitful artistic partnerships. 

One of the most fruitful was with celebrated Greek director Theo Angelopoulos. Angelopoulos had never worked with a well-known actor before, and was dubious about casting Marcello Mastroianni in his pathos-laden arthouse classic, The Beekeeper. 

“In my eyes he was a cinema icon, but he was someone who, so I thought, could only play either comic parts or in Fellini’s 8½. Certainly not the kind of person I needed for The Beekeeper,” Angelopoulos said in an interview with Dan Fainuru. But he saw him anyway, just to appease screenwriter Tonio Guerra (who’d worked on a host of Mastroianni films), and as he did, “I noticed the expression on his face was changing in the most amazing way. At certain moments, I had the feeling his eyes were getting wet. I was almost speechless and realized he was the actor I was looking for.”

Marcello Mastroianni (who performed in Italian, and then dubbed himself in Greek) was moving and widely acclaimed in the role of an aged beekeeper alone in the world. He would go on to work with Angelopoulos again on The Suspended Step of the Stork. 

The year after The Beekeeper, Mastroianni made another highly praised film with a director from outside of Italy. Set in the early 1900s, Dark Eyes saw Mastroianni play Romano, a middle-aged Italian adrift in his marriage to a rich society lady. Talking with a friendly Russian man he meets on a cruise, he tells the tale of his love affair with a young woman he encounters at a health spa—a tale that has an abundance of twists and turns.

Adapted from four short stories by Anton Chekhov, Dark Eyes is a stately, lusciously-lensed period drama, with a sparkling, fantastical sense of humor. Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov was an avowed Fellini fan who relished the chance to work with Mastroianni (in certain scenes, his influence is strikingly apparent), and Mastroianni’s skill at adding a self-deprecating edge to his romantic heroes meant he was a perfect fit for the charming, but profoundly flawed Romano. His lead turn made him the first non-native English speaker to receive three nominations for the Best Actor Academy Award.

Though Mastroianni remained adventurous in his choices, that’s not to say he totally avoided the sentimental stock-in-trade often offered to legendary actors who were getting on in years. In 1991’s A Fine Romance, he starred opposite Julie Andrews, as part of a couple who fall for each other after they realize their spouses have done the same. The film largely involves him and Andrews performing cultural stereotypes at each other. Frankly, it was far beneath them both.

More nuanced was another American feature in which he starred the following year, the family drama Used People, where he’s a man in love with a recently widowed woman played by Shirley MacLaine. While his character is the most thinly written, required only to be warm and twinkly as all the women around him deal with their complex inner lives (a gender flip which makes the film quite unusual!), his gentle gravitas provides the bristling, bustling movie a steady anchor. 

In a 1991 interview with The Washington Post, Mastroianni mused: “I am satisfied with my career. I can still work, and without this I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d like to live to be 150 years old—I could make films for another 50 years. I’m ready. Dying doesn’t interest me.” 

Alas, he could not avoid the grim reaper, but he continued to work all the way up until the end. Also during the last era of his career, he continued his long-running collaborations with Ettore Scola, Sophia Loren and Federico Fellini. He appeared alongside a pantheon of other legends in Agnès Varda’s centennial tribute to cinema A Hundred and One Nights. He co-starred with Burt Lancaster in lurid war movie The Skin, with Jack Lemmon in cozy comedy Macaroni, and originated the role that Robert De Niro would go on to play in Everybody’s Fine. And to top it all off, he gave a selection of legendary chat show hosts palpitations, dropping F-bombs on Dick Cavett, and lamenting the lack of “shit on the ground” in Los Angeles to David Letterman. Not a bad run of achievements for a man circling his sunset years!

Just a few months before he died, 1996’s Three Lives and Only One Death gave Marcello Mastroianni the most ambitious role—or roles—of his career. In Raul Ruiz’s surrealist puzzle box drama, four strange short stories are linked by the beguiling presence of Mastroianni, who at first appears to be playing four separate characters, until those characters start leaking into one another. The film requires him to be charming, funny, insane, lonely, sad, confused and menacing; to be the sun around which Ruiz’s wild, intricate production orbits. He excelled, of course—many reviews posited that no actor could have made it all come together as well as him.

Although he had one more film in the can, released the year after his death (Voyage to the End of the Universe), it seemed so fitting that the last in his lifetime would be as playful, engaging and complex a movie as he was a performer. 

He was the icon in the fountain with Anita Ekberg, sure, but he was also the pathetic lothario trapped in the city of women, and the balding Fred Astaire impersonator, and the artistically blocked film director. He was Sophia Loren’s husband, and her client, and her neighbor. He was imprisoned for murders he did do, and that he did not do. He battled against fascism, and was the victim of it. He was an aging, solitary beekeeper, and a starry-eyed young romantic on that snowy bridge, waiting for a love whose heart belonged elsewhere. 

He was Marcello Mastroianni, and there was, and never will be, another like him.

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.