Italy's grandest tragedian was thought too serious for comedy until 1958
Vittorio Gassman staged Italy's first complete Hamlet and played Othello, yet film producers doubted he could be funny. Mario Monicelli's heist caper Big Deal on Madonna Street proved them wrong and launched him as a comic star. Decades later he recited utility bills on television with the gravity he gave Dante.
Born Gassmann in Genoa on 1 September 1922, he was the son of Heinrich Gassmann, an engineer from Karlsruhe, and Luisa Ambron, an Italian Jewish woman from Pisa. He trained at Rome's Silvio D'Amico National Academy of Dramatic Arts and first appeared on stage in Milan in 1942. Film followed in 1946, and within a year he had made five pictures, with Bitter Rice arriving in 1948.
The stage made his reputation. In Luchino Visconti's company he played Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, and in 1952 he and Luigi Squarzina founded the Teatro d'Arte Italiano, which mounted rarities such as Seneca's Thyestes. A television series called Il Mattatore was so popular that its title became his lifelong nickname. Later he toured Manzoni's little-known Adelchi to half a million spectators with a travelling theatre, and founded a drama school in Florence that trained many younger actors.
His comedy breakthrough came almost by accident. The Istituto Italiano di Cultura in London counts Big Deal on Madonna Street among Italian cinema's masterpieces and says it helped both Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni, Gassman especially. Acclaimed films followed, including The Great War in 1962 and Scent of a Woman in 1974. His English let him work in Hollywood too, where he followed and married Shelley Winters and appeared opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Rhapsody.
He married three actresses, Nora Ricci, Winters and Diletta D'Andrea, and had a son, the actor Alessandro, with Juliette Mayniel, making him grandfather to the singer Leo Gassmann. In 1994 he voiced Mufasa in the Italian Lion King. He died of a heart attack in his sleep at home in Rome on 29 June 2000, aged 77, and was buried at Campo Verano.
Source: Vittorio Gassman
