Franco Zeffirelli
(Florence, 1923-Rome, 2019) Italian film and theater director.Although his real name was Gianfranco Corsi, he has gone down in film history under the artistic pseudonym Franco Zeffirelli.Author of some of the most representative films of Italian cinema of the last quarter of the 20th century, he brought to the seventh art an aesthetic and decadent vision, although not devoid of humanity and tenderness.
Franco Zeffirelli
He had a sad and unusual childhood, marked by tragedy, uprooting and the lack of family references to guide him in his academic training and sentimental education.His mother, a fashion designer, had conceived him in an adulterous relationship, so she invented for him a surname-Zeffirelli-that did not link him to the Corsi family (that is, that of her legitimate husband).He grew up, then, during his first years next to his mother, who died prematurely, a victim of tuberculosis, when little Gianfranco was only eight years old.The future filmmaker was then in the care of a cousin of his father, who was his tutor until the young man reached the age of majority.
Interested, in his youth, in architecture, Franco Zeffirelli enrolled in the Accademia di Belle Arti in his hometown, where he graduated in this field.However, he soon became more attracted to the world of cinema, theater and the media; and thus, after a brief period as a collaborator on Radio Firenze (1946), he made his debut on celluloid as an actor, playing the supporting role of Fillippo Garrone in L'onorevole Angelina (Deputy Angelina, 1947 ), by the Roman director Luigi Zampa (1905-1991).
But before surprising locals and strangers again with the premiere of his particular version of Shakespearean Hamlet , Zeffirelli had returned to the headlines of cultural pages around the world as a result of a bitter controversy that he starred in 1988, after the presentation in Venice of The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), another controversial recreation of the life of the Nazarene.Shot by the American filmmaker Martin Scorsese from the homonymous novel by the Greek Nikos Kazantzakis, this film once again aroused the suspicion of Christians around the world, including Franco Zeffirelli, who, after having offered his Jesus of Nazareth , he believed himself more than authorized to judge this new cinematographic look at the most human aspects in the life journey of Jesus Christ.
Zeffirelli harshly criticized Scorsese's film, and he added to the chorus of those who denounced in the North American film an excess of carnality inappropriate for the purity of Christ; but, at the same time, he could not hide his displeasure because, during the same festival, his film The Young Toscanini (1988) had gone unnoticed, withdrawn from the screens after a single exhibition.At that time, in addition, the Florentine filmmaker expressed his ideological sympathies for the political line of the tycoon (and, later, president of the Italian government) Silvio Berlusconi, which ended up worsening his image in the most progressive circles around the world.
From then on almost all his films would be received with a certain coldness, as happened to his film Stori di una capinera (1993).In 1995, he directed a new version of the novel Jane Eyre in the United Kingdom, by the famous nineteenth-century writer Charlotte Brontë; and four years later he added to his filmography the feature film Tea with Mussolini (1999), with Maggie Smith and Lily Tomlin in the leading roles.Finally, he returned to opera with the documentary Callas forever (2002), dedicated to his close friend María Callas, with whom he had worked on different operatic productions.One of his last productions was Tre fratelli (2005), although his work as a stage director could once again be admired in his adaptation of Verdi's La Traviata (premiered in Madrid in August 2006).In November 2004 he was made a Knight of the British Empire, being the first Italian to receive this distinction.
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