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Vittorio de Sica (July 7 1901 – November 13 1974) was an Italian neorealist director and actor.

Life

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.

Directorial Acclaim

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.

Personal Life

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 Her Own Story in 1980.

Selected filmography

External link

1901 births | 1974 deaths | Natives of the Lazio | Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nominees | Italian film directors | Italian silent film actors

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Vittorio De Sica".

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