Bertolucci Receives Hollywood Star

The famous director, is mostly known for the movies ‘The Last Emperor’ and ‘Last Tango in Paris’.

Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, known for the movies ‘The Last Emperor’ and ‘Last Tango in Paris’, will receive his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on February 19. A few months ago, the director was received the Golden Lion for life achievements at the 64^th Venice Film Festival. His star will be revealed in front of the façade of the Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

Teenager director

Bernardo Bertolucci was born in Parma in 1941, and he started writing in his teenage. Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini discovered his potential. Although Bertolucci was only twenty years old, he hired him as first assistant for the movie ‘Accattone’. When this film appeared in cinemas stirred up spirits with its realistic picturing of the Italian world. Bertolucci was also noticed by Sergio Leone, who asked him to write the story for epochal ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’. Leone eventually gave up from his version because he considered them too brainy for the American audience towards which it was addressed.

Bertolucci directed his first movie ‘La comare secca’, a crime film about murders and prostitutes, when he was only 21. The young director rode the wave of the expanding of Italian cinema, that lasted the whole decade. In the seventies of the last century, this wave eventually deflated and Bertolucci was forced to film his movies in the production with companies from other countries.

A director who generated controversies  

‘Last Tango in Paris’ (1972) marked a new trend of Italian cinema – famous international faces in main roles and marginalization of local talents. The film attracted a lot of attention when it was released, and the scene with Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider and butter is considered one of the strongest in the history of cinematography. Due to supposed pornography, all the copies of the movie were destroyed. Years after moral values had changed, Bertolucci himself published the movie, of which he had saved a copy.

Bertolucci was the first to received authorization to shoot a film in the Forbidden City in China, where he filmed his ‘The Last Emperor’, about the last emperor of China dethroned by Mao Tse-Tung. The movie won all nine Oscars it was nominated for, including the one for best movie 1987.

The great Italian director is known for a group of psychoanalysts who follow him constantly and often analyze his dreams. Brando himself said that his intimate conversations with the director are the cause of his star performance in ‘Last Tango’, because they helped him to live through better the character Paul, a man whose wife dies of a violent death.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s star is the proof of an exceptional and influential career that gave us some of the best movies of Italian and world’s cinematography.