Incident

Home page

Incident

Director Monicelli commits suicide

01 December 2010 03:23 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Italian filmmaker Mario Monicelli has committed suicide by throwing himself out of the window in a hospital where he was being treated for prostate cancer, APA reports quoting Press TV.

The 95-year-old master of the Commedia all’Italiana (Comedy Italian style) took his life at the San Giovanni hospital in Rome on November 29.

Monicelli was known for his caustic wit and combining laugh-out-loud humor with biting social criticism, ANSA reported.

Born in the Tuscan town of Viareggio in 1915, Monicelli began his cinematic career in 1934 with making a short silent film called The Paul Street Boys, which won him an award at the Venice Film Festival.

Monicelli made his first feature-length film Summer Rain in 1937.

He started making comedies after he teamed up with the legendary Neapolitan actor Antonio De Curtis, known as Toto.

After a number of low budget comedies, Monicelli and Toto made i Soliti Ignoti which turned out to be Monicelli’s biggest hit at the time and was later remade twice in the US.

"He was someone who wanted to control his own life to the very end,â€ said Italian director Carlo Lizzani. â€œHis death was an act of lucidity."

Producer Aurelio De Laurentiis said, "I knew him very well and knew his great dignity and his desire to always be independent and autonomous, so I can understand why he did it."

"He recently lost his sight but he remained sharp as a tack and he could not tolerate the idea of having to depend on someone," he added.

Amici Mei, Big Deal on Madonna Street and La Granda Guerra are among Monicelli’s best-known works.

He was also a critic of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and collaborated on a documentary about the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa where many anti-globalization protesters were injured in clashes with the police.

Monicelli also slammed culture budget cuts proposed by Berlusconi’s government in June 2010 and called for student protests against the cuts.