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Twenty years ago Alberto Sordi died

2023-02-24T10:15:07.102Z


The great actor who died in his native Rome on 24 February 2003. His life, films and some of his most famous clips © Ansa


At Via San Cosimato 7 in the Roman district of Trastevere there is no longer anyone who can claim to have known him.

On the wall a plaque commemorates this illustrious Roman who in the collective memory embodies the exemplary Italian with all his great defects and his small virtues.

20 years without the national Albertone

Son of a master instrumentalist (he played the tuba and taught music) and a teacher, Albertone spent his childhood in Valmontone.

Back in Rome in 1937, he studied opera singing until he joined the Sistine choir: he was a boy with a soprano voice, but he soon discovered a natural bass.

Years after the first dubber contracts lending the voice to Oliver Hardy, after winning a Metro Goldwin Meyer competition in 1937. Music was his friend many times, from the revue theater (recalled in his "Stardust")

during

the war up to military service when he served in the band of the "Turin" infantry regiment, from enrollment in the SIAE as a mandolin player in the 1950s up to the music of "Fumo di Londra"

The first successes arrive immediately after the war, on the radio, with a range of characters who have become immortal: the companion of the parish, Mario Pio, Count Claro.

What could have been his curse (a marked Trasteverine accent that earned him the expulsion from the Milanese Academy of Amateur Dramatics) was instead the key to his popularity.

As producer Vittorio De Sica

bet on him

for the unfortunate

"Mamma mia, what an impression"

which he drew heavily from the radio repertoire, but above all the almost contemporary

Federico Fellini

who wanted him to star in his debut,

"Lo sceicco bianco"

(1952 ).



For Fellini he embodied a star of photo novels but the bankruptcy experience did not break the friendship between the two and with the subsequent

"I vitelloni"

the wind began to blow in the right direction.

Sordi made himself comfortable as if in a second skin in the role of the indolent Alberto who spends his days between billiard games, goliardic jokes and the melancholy of life.

Shaped by an expert craftsman of comedy like Steno, that mask made the spectators fall in love between

"A day in the district court"

,

"Piccola posta"

and above all

"An American in Rome"

(1954) with the bully Nando Moriconi.



From that moment his career became frenetic at the rate of even 10 films a year for a record 152 appearances until his death on February 24, 2003.

If in the 1950s Alberto Sordi created essentially comic and parodic characters, in the 1960s he prepared to become one of the four "colonels" of the Italian comedy.

The turning point, however, coincides with a dramatic interpretation in one of the most important films in the history of Italian cinema:

"The Great War"

by Mario Monicelli, awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and opposed by legions of moralists and conservatives.

The following year he would repeat with another film on the double ridge of comedy and tragedy, "Tutti a casa" by Luigi Comencini: once again with a weakness capable of redemption during a crucial moment in history, 8 September 1943 and the next choice of the Resistance.

In 1961 Sordi continued his personal reinterpretation of the Italian facts with

"A difficult life"

by Dino Risi.

Now to choose it are the masters of that comedy of manners that mercilessly scolds the defects of the average Italian.

Sordi often participates in the elaboration of the scripts (about 140 in addition to his directing) and finds in the Venetian Rodolfo Sonego his favorite accomplice.

The man was much more cultured and thoughtful than he liked to show and even in the gloomy

"

(again by Monicelli) appears as bewildered as he is aware in the role of the clerk Giovanni Vivaldi, an implacable killer with a desire for justice and revenge after the death of his son.

His successes are now eternal and even American critics celebrate him today as a monument of the art of acting.

It would be a mistake to think that improvisation and naturalness are the keys with which he managed to immerse himself in such different protagonists: from

"Boom"

, from

"I mostri"

,

"Gastone", "Il medico della mutua"

(perhaps the most emblematic of all),

"In the year of the Lord", "The most beautiful evening of my life", "The scientific scopone", "The Marquis of Grillo"

In 1966 he wanted to direct himself and

"Smoke of London"

well revealed his personal contradictions with an anti-hero unable to understand the change of time.

The excellent receipts of the film convinced him to repeat himself and in the end he would have told himself in 19 films.

He would never have worked with Fellini again but a memorable "audition" of his for "Casanova" is preserved in the Cineteca Nazionale.

Throughout his life, to his objective satisfaction, the label of the "average Italian" remained attached to him, smart, pleasant, cowardly or weak, in his own way naive and basically of sound principles.

But Alberto Sordi actually knew how to do everything (this is confirmed by his talents as a television entertainer and his rehearsals as a dancer), he cared about his private life (the only love he confessed was for Andreina Pagnani in his youth), he trusted only his family (a brother , two sisters handmaids and custodians of her beautiful villa on the Appian Way), showed modest generosity such as charitable donations, unostentatious religiosity and good nature always confirmed by the one she had elected as artistic heir, Carlo Verdone. 

A few details are enough to recall how much of a 20th-century legend he was: on 15 June 2000, the mayor of Rome, Francesco Rutelli, gave him his tricolor sash for one day;

on his death his body was embalmed and so they greeted him, in an interminable two-day procession to the Capitol, all his fellow citizens;

at the solemn funeral in San Giovanni in Laterano, a crowd of 250,000 people accompanied him for the last time.

Narciso as a true showman, built his own artistic biography in the passionate "Story of an Italian" for public television.

A joke by the "Marchese del Grillo" commemorates him on his grave: "Sor Marchese, it's time".

Source: ansa

All life articles on 2023-02-24

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