Having already made a reputation as one of the greatest Italian film directors of his generation, Bernardo Bertolucci, who has died aged 77, gained worldwide notoriety with Last Tango in Paris (1972), mainly as a result of its explicit sex scenes. In his depiction of the painful, loveless, joyless relationship between a middle-aged American man (Marlon Brando) and a young Frenchwoman (Maria Schneider), Bertolucci set out to show, he said, that “every sexual relationship is condemned”.

Fifteen years later, Bertolucci gained his greatest international triumph with The Last Emperor (1987), which won nine Oscars. According to Bertolucci, cinema is “a truly poetic language”, a claim that many of his films justify. He had started out as a poet, with his collection In Cerca del Mistero (In Search of Mystery) winning the Viareggio prize in 1962, as his father had done before him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter O’Toole as the tutor Reginald Johnston and Wu Tao as Emperor Pu Yi in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, 1987. Photograph: BBC Two

He was the son of Attilio Bertolucci, a well-known Italian poet, and Ninetta (nee Giovanardi), a school teacher. As a boy Bernardo often accompanied his father to the cinema in Parma, the city where he was born and brought up, and began making 16mm films when he was 16 years old. He got to know the poet Pier Paolo Pasolini through his father, and when Pasolini made his first film, Accatone (1961), Bernardo was hired as production assistant.

A year later he directed his first feature, The Grim Reaper (La Commare Secca), based on a five-page story outline by Pasolini. It told of an investigation into the murder of a prostitute in Rome, seen from different perspectives of different people on the events of her last day. Each episode, as told to the unseen investigator, was filmed in a different style. It is, as the director admitted, the film of “someone who had never shot one foot of 35mm before but who had seen lots and lots of films”.

Before the Revolution (1964), a far more personal film, explores the problems of a selfish middle-class young man who is torn between radical politics and conformity, and between a passionate affair with his young aunt and bourgeois marriage. He opts for respectability on both counts. The film, loosely based on Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, is technically impressive, as is Bertolucci’s ability to articulate themes, such as the betrayal of a totemic father and the connection of the libido with politics, that would mature in his later work. However, as with the film’s hero, there is an element of the dilettante in Bertolucci’s approach.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bernardo Bertolucci, left, on location with Marlon Brando during the filming of Last Tango in Paris, 1972. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

This impression grew stronger in Partner (1968), which is an undigested homage to Jean-Luc Godard, about a young man literally divided into two by having a double. Derived from Dostoevsky’s short novel The Double, and updated to the Rome of 1968, it has the central character, played by Pierre Clémenti, speaking French while all the rest speak Italian. In the same year, Bertolucci was credited with the story of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

Bertolucci’s reputation was greatly enhanced when he joined forces with the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who had been a camera operator on Before the Revolution. The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), the first of eight films they made together as director and director of photography, easily transposed the Jorge Luis Borges story Theme of the Traitor and the Hero from Ireland to Italy. As oedipal and labyrinthine as its source, it concerns a young man who revisits the village in the Po valley where his father was murdered by the fascists in 1936, and gradually discovers that his father, whom he had considered a hero, was really a traitor.

The Conformist (1970) most successfully brings together Bertolucci’s Freudian and political preoccupations in an ironic study of pre-war Italy (beautifully captured by Storaro) and an attempt to penetrate the mind of ordinary fascism. The childhood trauma of having shot a chauffeur who tried to seduce him, together with his own repressed homosexuality, is a strong factor in making Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant) contract a bourgeois marriage and offer his services to the fascist party, for whom he is asked to assassinate his former professor. The Conformist saw the full flowering of Bertolucci’s flamboyant style – elaborate tracking shots, baroque camera angles, opulent colour effects, ornate décor and the intricate play of light and shadow that give his work such a distinctive surface.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jean-Louis Trintignant and Stefania Sandrelli in a scene from Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, 1970.

Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext

After the release of Last Tango in Paris in Europe, Bertolucci was indicted by a court in Bologna for making a pornographic film. Although he was acquitted, he lost his civil rights (including his right to vote) for five years and the Italian courts ordered that all copies of the film should be destroyed. In recent years, further controversy surrounded the extent to which Schneider had consented to elements of the film shoot.

The worldwide acclaim and box office for Last Tango in Paris helped Bertolucci obtain the vast financial resources needed to embark on the long-planned project 1900. With this $6m, five-hour epic, released in 1977, Bertolucci turned away from the introspection of his previous films and tried to make a popular movie of the class struggle using the style of both American epics and the socialist realism of the Russian cinema of the 30s. Italian history is seen through the diverging lives of Olmo (Gérard Depardieu), the son of a peasant woman, and Alfredo (Robert De Niro), the son of the lord of the manor (Burt Lancaster), both born on the same day, 27 January 1901, through to Italy’s Liberation Day, 25 April 1945. Often bombastic and didactic, it enters greatness in the last 30 minutes.

Luna (1979) was the story of a passionate mother/son relationship, in which an internationally renowned opera singer (Jill Clayburgh) has an almost incestuous relationship with her spoiled teenage son who is searching for a father. Bertolucci’s virtuosity is undeniable in the film, which threads together a series of splendid scenes (or arias and duets) on the string of an opaque plot.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando in a scene from Last Tango in Paris, 1972. Photograph: Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981) was Bertolucci’s first film to deal with contemporary Italy since 1964. The elliptical, quasi-thriller tells of a factory owner and self-made man (Ugo Tognazzi), who sees his son being forcibly hustled into a car. The police suspect the victim of colluding in his own kidnapping because of his far left sympathies. The reverse of the Spider’s Stratagem, in which a son investigates his father’s life, this ambiguous view of terrorism failed to please the public and critics mainly because the crime is not solved.

It was six years before Bertolucci was able to make another film. In the meantime, he wrote two screenplays based on Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, which he hoped would be his first film set in America. When nothing came of it, he went to China to shoot The Last Emperor in English. It was the first western film to be made almost entirely in China with active official Chinese participation. The biopic of Pu Yi, China’s last emperor or “Son of Heaven” who is “re-educated” by the Maoist regime, is a fascinating, sumptuous epic, covering nearly 60 years of China’s cataclysmic history.

Another exploration of the Bertolucci theme of the upper classes learning about working-class life, the film looks every cent of its $21m cost, which included paying for 19,000 extras, 9,000 costumes, and 2,000 kilos of pasta for the Italian crew. Especially impressive was Storaro’s luminous photography, capturing the golden splendour of the palace in the Forbidden City.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bernardo Bertolucci directing Debra Winger and John Malkovich on the set of The Sheltering Sky, 1990. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar

After his two-year sojourn in China, Bertolucci completed what he called his “eastern trilogy”, his exploration of non-western cultures, which opened up his work to existential and philosophical themes: The Sheltering Sky (1990), shot in Algeria, Morocco and Niger, and Little Buddha (1993), shot in Bhutan and Nepal.

The former, based on Paul Bowles’ mystical, metaphysical semi-autobiographical novel, followed an egocentric American couple travelling to find the meaning in their relationship. Bertolucci felt that The Sheltering Sky had much in common with Last Tango in Paris. “Isn’t the empty flat of Last Tango a kind of desert and isn’t the desert an empty flat?” he asked. But despite the beautifully captured arid landscapes, the film itself was dramatically arid.

Little Buddha sets the ancient tale of Siddartha (Keanu Reeves) and his quest for enlightenment alongside a contemporary story of an eight-year-old American boy who may be the reincarnation of a famous Buddhist master. The film, which contrasts the two worlds by underlining the blue tonality of Seattle and the red and gold of the oriental story, was aimed at children, though it was more simplistic than simple, and pleased neither children nor adults.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Liv Tyler in a scene from Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1996 film Stealing Beauty. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar

After his expensive, exotic enterprises, Bertolucci returned to home ground, working on a smaller, more intimate scale with Stealing Beauty (1996), a minor piece about a teenage American girl’s sexual awakening at a villa in Tuscany, inhabited by artists and bohemians, and Besieged (1998), set in Rome, which focuses on the relationship between a reclusive English pianist and his young African housekeeper. Made originally for Italian television, Besieged gave Bertolucci a chance to rediscover a kind of spontaneity in film-making which he felt he had lost since the 1960s.

Bertolucci then tried to recapture the spirit of the student uprising in Paris in 1968 in The Dreamers (2003), but its events provide only a background to a cloistered ménage-a-trois whose main preoccupations are sex and the movies. Paying homage to Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, the film is the apotheosis of Bertolucci’s cinephilia, always an element in his films.

Owing to serious back problems, he used a wheelchair and did not make another film for nine years. Me and You (2012), his first Italian movie since 1981, was a relatively modest affair with a small cast and largely one location – a cellar in which a teenage boy is holed up with his half-sister.

Bertolucci is survived by his second wife, the screenwriter and director Clare Peploe, whom he married in 1978. His first marriage, to the actor Adriana Asti, the female lead in Before the Revolution, ended in divorce.

• Bernardo Bertolucci, film director, born 16 March 1941; died 26 November 2018</s>Bernardo Bertolucci, whose epic The Last Emperor won nine Oscars and who influenced generations of filmmakers with other groundbreaking works such as The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, has died aged 77.

His publicist, Flavia Schiavi, said the Italian director died on Monday from cancer.

The Last Emperor, an adaptation of the autobiography of China’s last imperial ruler, Pu Yi, swept the 1987 Oscars, winning every category in which it had been nominated, including best picture and best director.

It is among the movies that have won the most Academy Awards and was also the first Western epic about China made with the Chinese government’s cooperation.

Born on March 16, 1941, into a wealthy family in the northern Italian city of Parma, Bertolucci was a prodigious talent from a young age.

The son of well-known poet and writer Attilio Bertolucci, he himself won an award for his poetry at 21, then decided to become a filmmaker.

Bertolucci’s debut film, The Grim Reaper in 1962, was an investigation into the murder of a Roman prostitute told from multiple points of view.

In 1970, he received his first Academy Award nomination for the adapted screenplay of The Conformist, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia.

The film is set during Italy’s Fascist period and centres on a tormented intellectual (Jean-Louis Trintignant) recruited by Mussolini’s secret police to go to Paris to assassinate an anti-Fascist professor who was once his teacher.

Shot by ace cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, The Conformist is now hailed as a masterpiece that exerted a major influence on other filmmakers, especially the so-called New Hollywood directors of the day, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

Although Tango is regarded as one of the most important films of the 20th century, it generated particular controversy for its anal rape scene, in which butter is used as a lubricant.

Bertolucci acknowledged later that the scene was sprung as a surprise on female lead Maria Schneider, then 19, in order to elicit an authentic reaction from her “as a girl, not as an actress.”

Before her death in 2011, Schneider told an interviewer she had “felt humiliated and ... a little raped” by Brando and Bertolucci. But the director denied he had mistreated her.

Last Tango also landed Bertolucci in trouble with the law in his homeland. He was brought up on charges of obscenity, which caused him to lose his civil rights for five years. “I could not vote, and that was the punishing part,” he said. “I felt like I’m not Italian anymore.”

The political exile of sorts played a part in his choice to make what he called his “faraway movies” set in distant locales: The Last Emperor in China; The Sheltering Sky (1990) in North Africa; and Little Buddha (1993), in Nepal and Bhutan.

The worldwide fame Bertolucci achieved with Last Tango allowed him to mount his first Hollywood production, the daring historical epic 1900, in Italy.

It stars Burt Lancaster - who was so eager to be in the film he worked for free - and also Donald Sutherland, Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu.

They acted alongside farmers from Italy’s Emilia region, where the sweeping depiction of social struggle is set.

Bertolucci’s director’s cut of 1900 was five hours, 17 minutes long, prompting a fierce battle with Paramount.

The version released in the US in 1977 clocked in at three hours and five minutes. The fight, and the film’s mixed critical response, nearly ended Bertolucci’s career.

But 10 years later, in 1987, he came roaring back in the US when the Academy awarded nine Oscars to The Last Emperor in what he has called “perhaps my most curious Hollywood moment.”

Among the accolades bestowed on him were the Cannes Film Festival’s Honorary Palme d’Or for lifetime achievement, in 2011; the Venice Film Festival’s Honorary Golden Lion, in 2007; and the Locarno Film Festival’s Leopard of Honour, in 1997.

Bertolucci is survived by his third wife, screenwriter and director Clare Peploe, whom he married in 1979.</s>ROME
• Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, whose films include Last Tango In Paris and 1900, died yesterday, Italian media said.

He was 77. His publicist said he died at home in Rome from cancer.

Considered one of the giants of Italian cinema, he also mined success in Hollywood and was the only Italian ever to win the Oscar for best film, snapping up the award in 1988 for The Last Emperor.

The biographical masterpiece about the last Chinese emperor won a total of nine Oscars, all of those for which it was nominated, including Best Director.

It was also touted as the first Western epic about China that was made with the Chinese government's cooperation.

Born in Parma, north-eastern Italy, in 1941, Bertolucci made films that were often highly politicised, dealing with workers' struggles in the 1976 movie 1900 or the fate of left-wingers in fascist Italy in The Conformist (1970).

He acquired notoriety for his 1972 erotic drama Last Tango In Paris starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, which featured a controversial sex scene involving butter.

But others noted that the movie explored politics and sexuality too.

According to trade publication Variety, Bertolucci later revealed that the scene was not told to Schneider, then 19, in advance, in order to get an authentic reaction from her "as a girl, not as an actress".

But the controversy over the movie allowed him to tap a high-profile cast, including Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu and Burt Lancaster, for his 300-minute epic 1900, the Guardian noted.

When asked in 2013 how he would like to be remembered, Bertolucci said: "I don't care. I think my movies are there, people can see them.

"And sometimes I laugh, thinking I will be remembered more as a talent scout of young girls than as a film director."

The list of starlets he discovered includes Dominique Sanda in The Conformist, Schneider, Liv Tyler in Stealing Beauty (1996) and Eva Green, who made her screen debut in The Dreamers (2003).

Bertolucci, who had been wheelchair-bound for more than a decade, won an honorary Palme d'Or for his life's work at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.</s>ROME—Italian film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci, who won Oscars with “The Last Emperor” and whose drama “Last Tango in Paris” shocked the world, died Monday.

Considered one of the giants of Italian and world cinema, Bertolucci was the only Italian ever to win the Oscar for best film, snapping up the award in 1988 for “The Last Emperor.” The biographical film about the last Chinese emperor won a total of nine Oscars.</s>Bernardo Bertolucci, whose epic “The Last Emperor” won nine Oscars and who influenced generations of filmmakers with other groundbreaking works such as “The Conformist” and “Last Tango in Paris,” in which he explored politics and sexuality through personal storytelling and audacious camera work, has died.

He was 77. His publicist, Flavia Schiavi, said that Bertolucci died at 7 a.m. Monday from cancer.

Italy’s greatest auteur of his generation, Bertolucci managed to work both in Europe and Hollywood, though his relationship with the studios had its ups and downs. But even when he operated within the studio system, Bertolucci always managed to make films that were considered projections of his inner world.

“The Last Emperor,” an adaptation of the autobiography of China’s last imperial ruler, Pu Yi, swept the 1987 Oscars, winning every category in which it had been nominated, including best picture and best director. With it, Bertolucci became the first and only Italian to win the Oscar for best director. “The Last Emperor” is among the movies that have won the most Academy Awards and was also the first Western epic about China made with the Chinese government’s cooperation.

Born March 16, 1941, into a wealthy family in the northern Italian city of Parma, Bertolucci was a prodigious talent from a young age. The son of well-known poet and writer Attilio Bertolucci, he himself won an award for his poetry at 21, then decided to become a filmmaker.

He started out as an assistant to another Italian poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini, on Pasolini’s first feature “Accattone,” in 1961, a portrayal of a Roman pimp. Bertolucci’s own debut film, “The Grim Reaper” in 1962, was an investigation into the murder of a Roman prostitute told from multiple points of view. The movie screened at the Venice Film Festival.

In 1970, he received his first Academy Award nomination for the adapted screenplay of “The Conformist,” based on a novel by Alberto Moravia. The film is set during Italy’s Fascist period and centers on a tormented intellectual (Jean-Louis Trintignant) recruited by Mussolini’s secret police to go to Paris to assassinate an anti-Fascist professor who was once his teacher.

Kinetically shot by ace cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, “The Conformist” is now hailed as a masterpiece that exerted a major influence on other filmmakers, especially the so-called New Hollywood directors of the day, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.</s>NOVEMBER is Lung Cancer Awareness Month and we're urging Sunshine Coast locals to help raise awareness of the disease, reduce their risk and support those affected.

Lung cancer is the fourth most commonly diagnosed cancer in both men and women and is the leading cancer-related cause of death in Queensland.

In the Sunshine Coast region alone, around 312 people are diagnosed with lung cancer each year.

The main symptoms of lung cancer are a new dry cough or change in a chronic cough, chest pain or breathlessness, repeated bouts of pneumonia or bronchitis, or coughing or spitting up blood.

These symptoms do not necessarily mean you have cancer, but it's important to talk to your general practitioner if you experience them, so they can be checked.

While there are many factors that can contribute to lung cancer, we do know that smoking is the leading cause - and because of this many patients, particularly non-smokers, can feel stigmatised by their illness.

A cancer diagnosis is isolating - but it can be especially tough if there is stigma involved.

Stigma contributes to psychological distress, negatively impacting on the patient's quality of life and sometimes, tragically, influencing treatment decisions.

More education and awareness is needed to diminish lung cancer stigma, and with your help, we can ensure that no one goes through lung cancer alone.

If you or someone you know is affected by lung cancer, call Cancer Council's 13 11 20 for access to a comprehensive range of cancer publications, confidential support and referrals, or visit our website, cancerqld.org.au.</s>His publicist, Flavia Schiavi, said Bernardo Bertolucci died at his home in Rome on Monday morning. He had been suffering from cancer

Oscar-winning director Bernardo Bertolucci of The Last Emperor, died in Rome on Monday. He was 77. Bertolucci's epic drama The Last Emperor won nine Oscars. He influenced generations of filmmakers with other groundbreaking works such as The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris, in which he explored politics and sexuality through personal storytelling and audacious camera work.

His publicist, Flavia Schiavi, said Bertolucci died at his home in Rome on Monday morning. He had been suffering from cancer, reported variety.com

Italy's greatest auteur of his generation, Bertolucci managed to work both in Europe and Hollywood, though his relationship with the studios had its ups and downs. But even when he operated within the studio system, Bertolucci always managed to make films that were considered projections of his inner world.

"The Last Emperor", an adaptation of the autobiography of China's last imperial ruler, Pu Yi, swept the 1987 Oscars, winning every category in which it had been nominated, including best picture and best director.

With it, Bertolucci became the first and only Italian to win the Oscar for best director. "The Last Emperor" is among the movies that have won the most Academy Awards and was also the first Western epic about China made with the Chinese government's cooperation.

Catch up on all the latest entertainment news and gossip here. Also download the new mid-day Android and iOS apps to get latest updates

This story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed, agencies. Mid-day accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and data of the text. Mid-day management/mid-day.com reserves the sole right to alter, delete or remove (without notice) the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever</s>Acclaimed Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci died on Monday in Rome, his publicist confirmed to the media. The director of The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, the Academy Award-winning The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky and The Dreamers was 77 and was suffering from cancer. He is survived by his third wife, British screenwriter Clare Peploe.

Born on March 16, 1941, in Parma in Italy, Bertolucci made his directorial debut at the age of 21 with La Commare Secca (1962). His second film, Before the Revolution (1964), explores themes to which he would return in subsequent productions: the tensions between beauty and revolution, sexual desire and political commitment, fascism and communism.

The film that put Bertolucci on the world map was The Conformist (1970), based on Alberto Moravia’s novel of the same name. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a fascist foot soldier who plots the assassination of a political dissident who once taught him. The film was acclaimed for its imaginative production design and cinematography, by frequent collaborator Vittorio Storaro.

In 1972, at the age of 31, Bertolucci made the film for which he is best remembered: Last Tango in Paris. The erotic drama stars Marlon Brando as a widower who has a life-altering encounter with a much younger woman, played by Maria Schneider. The film caused controversy for its explicit sexual content, but was equally acclaimed for its narrative bravura, Brando’s poignant and heavily improvised performance, and Schneider’s heart-rending lack of inhibition.

The movie’s reputation has suffered in recent years along with Bertolucci’s after Schneider claimed in a 2007 interview that she had not been informed about the manner in which a controversial anal rape sequence was to be filmed. “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci,” she said. Bertolucci said in response that he did not regret his on-set decisions.

Other notable films include the historical epic 1900 (1976), which explored the tussle between communist activists and fascists in rural Italy. The star-studded cast included Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Donald Sutherland and Burt Lancaster. The film clocked 317 minutes, and was often screened in two parts.

Bertolucci’s most decorated work was The Last Emperor (1987), which won Academy Awards in every one of the categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. The sumptuously mounted film was based on the autobiography of Puyi, the last ruler of the Qing dynasty before Communist rule. Starring John Lone, Joan Chen and Peter O’Toole, The Last Emperor was the first Western production to be permitted to film inside the Forbidden City in Beijing, the palace complex that once housed the Chinese dynasties.

Bertolucci’s later work included The Sheltering Sky (1990), based on the Paul Bowles novel of the same name and starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger as a married couple desperately seeking to rekindle their relationship.

“I conceived of ‘The Sheltering Sky’ as a kind of anti-’Last Emperor,’ as a completely private project,” Bertolucci told the Los Angeles Times in an interview in 1990. “This is a story about two people in the desert, instead of a movie with 20,000 extras. ‘The Last Emperor’ was talking about history in capital letters. This was a film about intimate, private destinies.”

The 1990s and 2000s saw the Keanu Reaves-starrer Little Buddha (1993), which explores a quest to find a new Lama, the multilingual Stealing Beauty (1996) with Liv Tyler, Joseph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, The Dreamers (2003) and Italian drama Me and You (2012). The Dreamers, a tribute to the spirit of 1960s France and the French New Wave, marked the debut of Eva Green, who plays one peg of an erotic triangle involving her twin brother and their newly acquired friend.

The tributes paid to Bertolucci on social media include stills and clips from his films – a testament to his visual mastery and his command over the tools unique to cinema.</s>Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian director of seminal classics including “The Conformist”, “The Last Emperor” and the controversial “Last Tango in Paris”, has died at 77, local media said Monday, hailing the “last great maestro” of Italian cinema.

The revered filmmaker, who had been confined to a wheelchair in recent years, died at his home in Rome after a long illness, surrounded by family, said Italy's state-run broadcaster RAI.

Considered one of the giants of Italian and world cinema, Bertolucci was the first recipient of the Cannes Film Festival's Honorary Palme d'Or, awarded in 2011. He was also the only Italian ever to win an Oscar for Best Picture, snapping up the award in 1988 for "The Last Emperor". His biographical masterpiece about the last Chinese emperor won a total of nine Academy Awards, all of those for which it was nominated, including Best Director.

Born in Parma, northeastern Italy, in 1941, Bertolucci was a disciple of film legend Pier Paolo Pasolini and a self-professed Marxist. His films were often highly politicised, dealing with workers' struggles in the five-hour long epic "1900" (1976), starring Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu, or the fate of left-wingers in fascist Italy in "The Conformist" (1970), which many critics regard as his finest work.

Bertolucci, however, is best remembered for the sexually explosive "Last Tango in Paris", starring Marlon Brando, which has continued to stir controversy since its release in 1972. The Italian director was recently criticised for revealing that he withheld details of the film's infamous butter rape scene from actress Maria Schneider, who was 19 at the time.

Bertolucci returned to the themes of political and sexual awakening in many of his later films, which included "Stealing Beauty" (1996) and "The Dreamers" (2003). Despite working with some of Hollywood's biggest stars, he always defended his own filmmaking style against what he said was the pressure of the US film industry.

Gilles Jacob, the former president of the Cannes Film Festival, told AFP on Monday he was saddened by the death of "the last emperor of Italian cinema, the lord of all epics and all escapades". He added: "The party is over, it takes two to tango."</s>ROME, Nov 26 — Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci, whose films include Last Tango In Paris and 1900, has died in Rome aged 77, Italian media said today.

Considered one of the giants of Italian and world cinema, Bertolucci was the only Italian ever to win the Oscar for best film, snapping up the award in 1988 for The Last Emperor.

The biographical masterpiece about the last Chinese emperor won a total of nine Oscars, all of those for which it was nominated.

He acquired notoriety for his 1972 erotic drama Last Tango In Paris starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider which featured a controversial sex scene involving butter.

He had been wheelchair-bound for several years and won an honorary Palme d’Or for his life’s work at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

Former festival president Gilles Jacob said he was saddened by the death of “the last emperor of Italian cinema, the lord of all epics and all escapades.”

“The party is over: It takes two to tango,” Jacob told AFP.

Born in Parma, northeastern Italy, in 1941, Bertolucci made films that were often highly politicised, dealing with workers’ struggles in 1900 or the fate of left-wingers in fascist Italy in The Conformist.

In 2016 several Hollywood stars accused him and Brando of abusing Schneider by keeping her in the dark about how the notorious butter scene in Last Tango was to be shot.

Bertolucci acknowledged Schneider was not aware that Brando’s character would use butter as a lubricant during the scene in which the actor simulates anally penetrating his lover, played by then 19-year-old Schneider.

“The only new thing was the idea of the butter. It was this, I learned many years later, that upset Maria, and not the violence that was in the scene and was envisaged in the script of the film.

“It is both consoling and distressing that anyone could be so naive to believe that what happens on the cinema screen actually takes place,” he said of viewers.

Schneider, who suffered drug addiction and depression before her 2011 death, said four years earlier she had felt “a little raped” during the scene and was profoundly angry about it for years afterwards. — AFP
Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, whose film The Last Emperor won nine Oscars, dies of lung cancer.