Bernardo Bertolucci, Italian Director Of ‘Last Tango In Paris,’ Dead At 77 After Cancer Battle

Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci died at the age of 77 on Monday in Rome following a battle with cancer.

Among Bertolucci’s most famous films were The Conformist (1970), The Last Emperor (1987) and the highly controversial 1972 erotic drama Last Tango in Paris. 

The filmmaker’s movies were known for often containing explicit sex scenes and sexual themes. Last Tango in Paris proved to be especially scandalous for its time. The film centered on a recently widowed American hotel owner who starts an anonymous sexual relationship with a much-younger French woman in Paris. Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider starred in the lead roles for the movie, which had its rating changed multiple times from R to NC-17 and X due to the graphic sexual material. 

“I felt prosecuted by censorship,” Bertolucci told CNN in 2007 after Last Tango in Paris drew so much controversy that many people in the film industry began calling for it to be destroyed.

Bertolucci was considered one of the most prominent filmmakers of his generation, and his passion for movies reportedly started early, as his father was a film critic.

“When it comes to commercial cinema, I have the strange pleasure of feeling that I’m from another tribe, an infiltrator,” he told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in 1990.

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The director’s feature film debut came at age 21 in 1962, when he made the Italian movie La Commare Secca (The Grim Reaper). Bertolucci’s final film was the 2012 Italian drama Io e Te (Me and You), which was based on Niccolò Ammaniti‘s 2010 novel of the same name.

Of all Bertolucci’s films, The Last Emperor earned the most success. In 1988, it won all nine Oscars for which it had been nominated, including Best Picture and Best Director. The movie was about Puyi, China’s last emperor who served in the early 20th century and who died in 1967.

Former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was among those who shared tributes to Bertolucci on social media on Monday:

“Bernardo Bertolucci, one of the great masters of Italian cinema, has left us. I remember him as a spectator of his works, like everyone else. But also as a valuable advisor when we decided to invest more resources on cinema at Palazzo Chigi. Thank you Maestro, it was an honor. RIP” Renzi tweeted, adding a photo of him and the filmmaker.

Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi also posted a tribute to Bertolucci, who lived in the Italian capital, on Twitter.

“Farewell to the Great master Bernardo Bertolucci, with his works and his masterpieces has always marked the history of world cinema,” Raggi wrote. “The whole of Italy pays homage to him.”