Actress Piera Degli Esposti died in Rome (
THE SCHEDA
).
She had been ill for some time and had been hospitalized from 1 June at the Santo Spirito hospital in Rome.
She leaves shortly after having celebrated her magnificent 83 years: Bolognese soul and universal talent, barefoot queen of the Italian scene between theater, cinema, television and literature: barefoot because she had the gift of always seeming at ease in the most different clothes, but he loved life as a synonym for freedom.
Born in Bologna on March 12, 1938, Piera comes from the avant-garde theater of the 1960s and are masters such as Antonio Calenda, Aldo Trionfo, Giancarlo Cobelli, who hand over the keys to classical and modern theater, including Shakespeare and Giraudoux, Gombrowicz and D'Annunzio between the Aquila building and the Teatro dei 101 where he meets young colleagues such as Nando Gazzolo and Gigi Proietti. Almost at the same time his volcanic talent also lands on television with the original television show "Il conte di Montecristo" directed in 1966 by Edmo Fenoglio with Andrea Giordana who becomes the darling of the Rai public. A year later it was Gianfranco Mingozzi who made her debut at the cinema with "Trio", while in '68 she composed together with Tino Buazzelli, Wanda Osiris, Fraco Parenti, Mario Pisu, the colorful cast of the "Pickwick club that Ugo Gregoretti directs in six television episodes.
Since then, Piera's career will never stop, always equally divided between the scene and the set, with an inexhaustible thirst for increasingly complex challenges. His technical preparation is beyond question, but it is the warmth, the pleasure of improvisation, the sensitivity in using the voice with different cadences, including native speech, that makes the difference. He will appear in about fifty films, about twenty dramas, he will be the protagonist in the theater for 50 good years and everywhere he will bring a freshness, a smile, an absolutely unique professionalism. The Taviani brothers ("Under the sign of the scorpion") and Pier Paolo Pasolini ("Medea"), Gianfranco Mingozzi and Lina Wertmuller (among his greatest friends and accomplices), Giuseppe Tornatore ("The unknown") and Marco love her. Bellocchio ("Thehour of religion "which earned her the first of three David di Donatello), up to Nanni Moretti" Sogni d'oro ") and Paolo Sorrentino (" Il divo ") in which she plays the legendary and impassive secretary of Giulio Andreotti in one of the her most famous characterizations On TV how not to remember her in the role of the abbess of Salvatore Nocita's "Promessi sposi" or in those of Clelia in "Tutti pazzi per amore" by Ivan Cotroneo.by Salvatore Nocita or in those of Clelia in "Tutti pazzi per amore" by Ivan Cotroneo.by Salvatore Nocita or in those of Clelia in "Tutti pazzi per amore" by Ivan Cotroneo.
Even in the theater he loved the impossible that it was the "Stabat mater" of 2002 or "The asparagus and the immortality of the soul" (from the aphorisms of Achille Campanile) of 2005.
In 1997 she began her artistic partnership with Dacia Maraini, her lifelong friend, who convinced her to write "Storia di Piera" together. The meeting of the two women, one a meticulous analyst of the soul and the other a natural narrator who draws on experience to transform it into literary creation, produces an authentic editorial event. It also tells of an unusual relationship between a mother and a daughter, a relationship full of sensuality and complicity, which evolves and lasts over the years. It tells of a sleepy childhood: a little girl who hatched her dreams in a tailor's shop, the abuses of her father's friends, and finally the discovery of the theater as the "house of desires". It tells the story of a lifetime. From book-scandal "Storia di Piera" it also becomes subject and script,with the complicity of Marco Ferreri who made it in 1983 one of his most personal and intense films, but in which the hand of Piera Degli Esposti guides and directs every gesture of the protagonists Hanna Schygulla and Isabelle Huppert. The literary story will have two sequels: "Piera and the assassins" again with Dacia Maraini in 2003 and "L'estate di Piera" (with Giampaolo Simi) just a year ago.
Instead, her mellow and warm voice, immediately recognizable, will accompany "The long life of Marianna Ucria" (Maraini's most famous novel) in the beautiful reading of 2011. In recent years she has also been appreciated as an opera director since the "Lodoletta" of Piero Mascagni and a memorable "The human voice" by Francis Poulenc.
Piera degli Esposti loved young people and spent herself for them until the last moment. Was it Riccardo Milani who "discovered" between "A big family" and "Welcome President" or Alessandro Aronadio ("Ears") or Sebastiano Mauri and Filippo Timi who accompanied the success of "Favola" in 2017, no project out of the lines it frightened, indeed it stimulated her to give a different image of herself. But the basis of her artistic vein always remained connected to that theater that had formed her: in the direct contact with the public, in the emotion of the performance, in the rigorous creation that leads to improvisation, she found every time an almost childlike taste of staging of life as a great theater of games. She liked to laugh, to be in company,strongly defend her ideas and was always curious about the ideas of others. She loved Piera very much, often younger men whose thirst for life enchanted her, and she never married. She said of herself: "More than an actress I am a great builder of images: I could also mythologize the first ice cream maker I meet on the street". Now we miss his Argentine laugh, his passion for politics and art, his desire to know and talk about himself without shame. We miss the "barefoot queen".Now we miss his Argentine laugh, his passion for politics and art, his desire to know and talk about himself without shame. We miss the "barefoot queen".Now we miss his Argentine laugh, his passion for politics and art, his desire to know and talk about himself without shame. We miss the "barefoot queen".