Vittorio Gassman
Vittorio Gassman was born on September 1, 1922 in Genoa to a father from a wealthy family of German origins and a Pisan mother.
While very young he moved to Rome, where he attended the studies at the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica where some of the most important figures of Italian theatre and cinema also studied, such as Paolo Stoppa, Rina Morelli, Adolfo Celi, Luigi Squarzina, Elio Pandolfi, Rossella Falk, Lea Padovani and, later, with Paolo Panelli, Nino Manfredi, Tino Buazzelli, Gianrico Tedeschi, Monica Vitti, Luca Ronconi and many others.
Gassman’s debut was in Milan, in 1942, with Alda Borelli in Niccodemi’s Nemica (theatre), he then moved to Rome and the Teatro Eliseo joining Tino Carraro and Ernesto Calindri in a team that remained famous; with them he acted in a range of plays from bourgeois comedy to the sophisticated intellectual theatre, with no apparent difficulty in the sudden changes.
In 1946, he made his film debut in Preludio d’amore, the year after he appeared in five films. In 1948 he played in in Riso amaro.
It was with Luchino Visconti’s company that Gassman achieved his mature successes, together with Stoppa, Rina Morelli and Paola Borboni. He played a vigorous Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ Un tram che si chiama desiderio, then emphatic in Shakespeare’s Rosalinda or in Vittorio Alfieri’s Oreste. He then joined the Teatro Nazionale with Tommaso Salvini, Massimo Girotti, Arnoldo Foà, for a successful Peer Gynt (Ibsen).
With Luigi Squarzina in 1952 he co-founded and co-directed the Teatro d’Arte Italiano, producing the first complete version of Hamlet in Italy, then rare works such as Seneca’s Thyestes or Aeschylus’s The Persians.
Gassman married three actresses: Nora Ricci (with whom he had Paola, an actress and wife of Ugo Pagliai); Shelley Winters (mother of his daughter Vittoria); and Diletta D’Andrea who gave him his younger son Jacopo. In addition, he had an affair with actress Juliette Maynel (who gave him Alessandro, also an actor.)
Gassman was also discussed as a person on account of his private life – his divorces (a noted scandal in Italy during the 1950s and 1960s) and his initial atheism. Also, in his public appearances on TV, he often made original or unconventional comments, sometimes with the clear intention of “shaking things up”; he also gained many enemies in show business for similarly frank judgments .
