Michelangelo Antonioni was one of the leading lights of post-WWII Italian cinema and—with his countrymen Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini—helped make Italian movies among the most ardently watched and discussed by serious filmgoers around the world. Antonioni's cool, rapturously beautiful studies of soul-shriveling alienation were closely analyzed and vigorously debated; he was also among the first filmmakers to make the transition from writing about movies to making them. Born into a well-off family in Ferrara, Italy, Antonioni showed an early interest in painting and puppetry, but graduated from the University of Bologna in 1935 with a practical degree in economics and commerce. He nevertheless made time to found a theater troupe, write and direct plays, and try his hand at film criticism before graduation. Five years later, married and having failed dismally at his first attempt to make his own film—a documentary about an insane asylum— Antonioni moved to Rome, found a job at the magazine Cinema and enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia to study directing. He soon found work assisting established directors, including Rossellini, and spent several years making documentaries about street cleaners, funiculars and rayon production. Antonioni was nearly 40 before he made his first fiction film, Cronaca di un amore/Story of a Love Affair, a 1950 noirish crime drama that contains hints of the elusive, oblique narratives to come. Le Amiche/The Girlfriends (1955)—made amid the collapse of his marriage and a lengthy bout with depression—earned a Silver Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival, but the film that made Antonioni's reputation was L'Avventura (1960), the enigmatic—some would say infuriating—story of a wealthy, beautiful young woman who vanishes while on holiday with her equally privileged friends. Both booed and cheered at the Cannes Film Festival, it won a special jury prize and became an international art-house sensation, hotly debated and extensively analyzed. It wound up being the first of a trilogy about emotional dislocation and spiritual emptiness that was completed with La Notte (1961) and Eclipse/L'Eclisse (1962). Antonioni began making color films with Red Desert/Il Deserto Rosso (1964) and then went Hollywood at the invitation of MGM, a sign of the mainstream American film industry's desperation in the face of a rapidly changing film market. Antonioni's Blowup (1966), an existential murder mystery starring David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave and set against the backdrop of Swinging London, featured then-controversial casual sex and drug use, nudity, heavy philosophical underpinnings and an overall air of jaded sophistication (not to mention a cameo by The Yardbirds), all of which helped make it a huge hit in an era when deep, difficult, controversial films were the last word in cool. But his follow-up, counterculture epic Zabriskie Point (1970), was a monumental flop that derailed his later career; even 1975's acclaimed The Passenger, with Jack Nicholson, couldn't restore the exalted position Antonioni held in his heyday. Antonioni had a stroke in 1985 and a year later married actress Enrica Fico, who appeared in his 1982 film, Identification of a Woman/Identificazione di una donna. (Their marriage lasted until his death.) Against all odds, Antonioni eventually made two more f
Michelangelo Antonioni Fast Facts:
- Wrote for Fascist film magazine Cinema in 1940, but was fired after a few months by editor Vittorio Mussolini, the son of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
- Served in the Italian army during World War II.
- Best known internationally for his English-language debut, the 1966 thriller Blowup, starring Vanessa Redgrave.
- Did not direct a feature film for more than a decade after being partially paralyzed by a stroke in 1985.
- With the assistance of director Wim Wenders, returned in 1995 with the dramatic anthology Beyond the Clouds, based on Antonioni's book That Bowling Alley on the Tiber: Tales of a Director.
- Michelangelo Antonioni Relationships:
- Carlo Antonioni - Father
- Elisabetta Antonioni - Mother
- Enrica Fico - Wife
- Letizia Balboni - Ex-wife
- Michelangelo Antonioni Awards:
- 1966 Oscar: Best Achievement in Directing - Nominee
- 1966 Oscar: Best Writing (Original Screenplay) - Nominee
- 1994 Oscar: Honorary Award - Winner
- College:
- University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy (BA in Economics and Commerce, 1935); attended Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Institute of Experimental Filmmaking), Rome, Italy
