Mario Monicelli, the celebrated film director of the Italian comedy, took his own life by leaping from the fifth-floor balcony of a Rome hospital where he was being treated for cancer. He was 95.
“Death doesn’t frighten me, it bothers me,” Monicelli, who was awarded the Career Golden Lion achievement award at the Venice Film Festival in 1991, said in a 2007 interview with magazine Vanity Fair.
“It bothers me for example that someone can be there tomorrow and and me, I am no longer there. What bothers me is no longer being alive.”
Monicelli’s father Tomaso Monicelli, a well-known journalist and anti-fascist, committed suicide in 1946.
Monicelli came to the fore during Italy’s golden age of cinema with I Soliti Ignoti, (Big Deal on Madonna Street), The Great War, For Love and Gold, and My Friends.
He directed around 65 films, many with household names in Italian cinema like Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi and Anna Magnani.
By arrangement with AKI