Monica Vitti, the versatile movie star of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura and other Italian alienation films of the 1960s, and later a leading comic actress, has died. She was 90.
Her death was announced Wednesday on Twitter by a former culture minister, Walter Veltroni, who said he had been asked to communicate her death by her husband, the photographer Roberto Russo.
“Goodbye to the queen of Italian cinema,” the current culture minister, Dario Franceschini, wrote in a statement.
Vitti had been out of the public spotlight for years, living quietly in Rome with her husband. She reportedly suffered from a form of dementia.
In her glamour days in the 1960s, she was best known for her starring roles in L’Avventura, La Notte, Eclisse (“Eclipse”) and Red Desert, all films directed by Antonioni, her lover at that time. The two were constant targets of paparazzi.
L’Avventura won her international attention and praise for her role as an icy cool woman drifting into a relationship with the lover of her missing girlfriend. In Red Desert, the last of the cycle, she plays a woman suffering from a deep, elusive neurosis as she struggled to deal with a transformed industrial world.
Vitti’s blond hair and blue eyes set her apart from classic Mediterranean screen stars such as the brown-haired Sophia Loren.
Antonioni himself paid tribute to her performance at a special screening in New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1999 to mark completion of a restoration project for Italian film.
“The protagonist, Giuliana, goes through a profound personal crisis because of her inability to adapt,” he said, in remarks read by his wife, Enrica.
After Vitti’s relationship with Antonioni ended, they didn’t work together again until 1980. At that point, she changed focus sharply and began making comedies, working with top directors and some of Italy’s leading actors, including Alberto Sordi, a tragi-comic one, in films whose characters often personified Italians’ strengths and foibles.