Vittorio De Sica
Vittorio de Sica (
July 7 1901 –
November 13 1974) was an
Italian neorealist director and
actor.
Born into
poverty in
Sora (
province of Frosinone,
Lazio), he started off as an office clerk to help support his impoverished family. By
1918, at the age of 16, he had already begun to dabble in stage work. He joined
Tatiana Pavlova's theatre company in
1923.
His good looks and breezy manner made him an overnight
matinee idol in
Italy with the release of his first sound picture,
La vecchia signora (
1931).
In
1933 he founded his own company with his wife
Giuditta Rissone and
Sergio Tofano. The company performed mostly light
comedies, but they also staged plays by
Beaumarchais, and worked with famous directors like
Luchino Visconti.
De Sica turned to directing during WWII, with his first efforts typical of the light entertainments of the time.
It was with his fifth film
The Children are Watching Us (
1942) that he began to use non-professional actors and socially conscious subject matter, revealing hitherto unsuspected depths and an extraordinarily sensitive touch with actors, especially children. The film was also his first of many collaborations with scenarist Cesare Zavattini, a combination which shaped the post-war Italian
Neorealist movement.
With the end of the war, De Sica's films began to express the personal as well as collective struggle to deal with the social problems of post-Mussolini Italy.
Shoeshine in
1947,
Bicycle Thieves in
1948 (two heartbreaking films which both won Honorary Academy Awards before the category of
Best Foreign Film was established) and
Umberto D in
1952 (a relentlessly bleak study of old age that was a box office disaster) all combined classic neorealist traits—working-class settings,
anti-authoritarianism, emotional sincerity—with technical and compositional sophistication and touches of poignant humour.
De Sica continued his career as an actor with sufficient success to finance some of his directorial projects, playing a host of twinkling-eyed fathers and
Chaplinesque figures in films such as
Bread Love and Dreams (
1954). He returned to directorial critical acclaim with
1961's harrowing
Two Women, which won his frequent leading lady
Sophia Loren a
Best Actress Oscar (the first time the award went to a performance not in the English language).
His later directorial career was highlighted by his work with Loren and
Marcello Mastroianni in
Yesterday Today & Tomorrow (
1963), which won the Oscar as Best Foreign Film. After a period of decline in which he came to be perceived as a slick, rather tasteless master of burlesque, De Sica resurfaced with
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (
1971), a
baroque political romance which won him another Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
De Sica lived with his second wife,
Maria Mercader, from
1942 on until his death, although he couldn't marry her until
1968 after acquiring French citizenship, which finally allowed him to divorce his first wife,
Giuditta Rissone. He had two sons with Mercader, Manuel and Christian. He was also known to be a compulsive gambler.
Active to the end, De Sica appeared as himself in
Ettore Scola's
We All Loved Each Other So Much (
1975), which was released after his death. He died following the removal of a cyst from one of his lungs. He was portrayed by
Edmund Purdom in the tele-movie
Sophia Loren: Her Own Story in
1980.
*
Gli uomini che mascalzoni (1932)
*
Il signor Max (1937)
*
Rose scarlatte (1939)
*
Grandi magazzini (1939)
*
Maddalena, zero in condotta (1940)
*
Teresa Venerdì (1941)
*
I bambini ci guardano (
The Children Are Watching Us) (1942)
*
Sciuscià (
Shoeshine) (1946)
*
Ladri di biciclette (
Bicycle Thieves) (1948)
*
Miracolo a Milano (
Miracle in Milan) (1951)
*
Umberto D (1952)
*
L'oro di Napoli (
The Gold of Naples) (1954)
*
La Ciociara (
Two Women) (1961)
*
Boccaccio '70 (segment
La riffa) (1962)
*
Ieri, oggi e domani (
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) (1963)
*
Matrimonio all'italiana (
Marriage Italian-Style) (1964)
*
Caccia alla volpe (
After the Fox) (1966)
*
Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) (1970)
*
Una Breve vacanza (
A Brief Vacation) (1973)
*
Il Viaggio (
The Voyage) (1974)
*
Vittorio de Sica director bio for The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Sony Pictures Entertainment website, retrieved April 8, 2006
