Lina Wertmüller, the first woman to score a Best Director nomination at the Academy Awards, died on Thursday in Italy. She was 93.
Wertmüller’s death was reported in the Italian press. According to a friend, the writer and director died “peacefully at home, next to her daughter and loved ones.”
Born in Rome, Wertmüller claimed she was expelled from dozens of Catholic schools as a child and developed an early love of comic books (especially “Flash Gordon”) and Soviet theater. Through friends, she was introduced to legendary film director Federico Fellini who quickly became her mentor.
Fellini hired Wertmüller as an assistant director on “8½” in 1963, the same year in which she made her directorial feature debut with “The Basilisks,” which went on to win her her first award for Best Director at the Locarno film festival.
In 1972 she made her Cannes debut with “The Seduction of Mimi,” a satirization of the male libido,...
Wertmüller’s death was reported in the Italian press. According to a friend, the writer and director died “peacefully at home, next to her daughter and loved ones.”
Born in Rome, Wertmüller claimed she was expelled from dozens of Catholic schools as a child and developed an early love of comic books (especially “Flash Gordon”) and Soviet theater. Through friends, she was introduced to legendary film director Federico Fellini who quickly became her mentor.
Fellini hired Wertmüller as an assistant director on “8½” in 1963, the same year in which she made her directorial feature debut with “The Basilisks,” which went on to win her her first award for Best Director at the Locarno film festival.
In 1972 she made her Cannes debut with “The Seduction of Mimi,” a satirization of the male libido,...
- 12/9/2021
- by K.J. Yossman
- Variety Film + TV
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Lina Wertmüller's The Basilisks is showing on Mubi starting January 2, 2021 in most countries in the series First Films First.In Tutto a posto e niente in ordine (2012) (“Everything in its right place and nothing in order”), the autobiography of Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spanol von Braueich, the director recounts the fortuitous way her debut feature came to be. “It was 1961, I was going to visit Francesco Rosi on the set of Salvatore Giuliano with [Italian film critic] Tulio Kezich and on our way we decided to stop by Palazzo San Gervasio,” the director reminisced, “my father’s native village.” “For me,” Wertmüller continued, “it was the discovery of a world.” Struck by this corner of southern Italy seemingly untouched by the economic boom, where modernity was simultaneously coveted and repudiated, Wertmüller, exhorted by Kezich, wrote the screenplay for I basilischi in a week.
- 1/5/2021
- MUBI
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