Vittorio Gassman Appreciation

FILAR

Failed in Los Angeles try Rome.

He was wonderful in "Sleepers".

Pretty good in Altman's "A Wedding"

Shame he is unknown here. Treasure in Italy, and The Easy Life is a great showcase for his talent. Thanks for posting, though you will get only a few responses from DL-ers. Guess he's not gay and fabulous

Shagged Gloria Graham

I liked him in Sharky's Machine.

[quote] I liked him in Sharky's Machine.

He was great in that. That movie, as a whole, is very underrated.

I've always liked him. I Remember when he was married to Shelley Winters. I think they had a kid.

R4 Let´s try this hook

Rhapsody (1954)

M-G-M's Magnificent Drama of Music and Romance

Fighting with John Ericson over Liz Taylors still tiny waist in glorious Technicolor.

Music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Pablo de Sarasate

Gowns by Helen Rose

Two masters at work. The scene between Dustin Hoffman and Vittorio.

His daughter with Shelley Winters (who is not a harridan, idiot OP) is a physician, Vittoria Gassman.

I loved all three leads in Rhapsody. Vittorio, Elizabeth and the piano player guy.

Shelley Winters had a sad end. You would too if your best friend was Sally Kirkland.

Thought this email was about gay porn star - Vito Gallo.

Yeah, it's different!

Vittorio was an uncommonly beautiful man. But he wasn’t obsessed with his own looks.

Thanks to this thread I watched Sleepers earlier this evening.He was glorious. His acting is so natural and so authentic.

If that queen Henry Willson had dug his hooks into him, he would have changed his name to Boulder Cassini or something.

He was hot until about age 30. He aged quickly and poorly. Chain smoking for sure, but also heavy drinking.

His son Alessandro is a big star in Italy.

Alessandro is maturing much better than his father did.

"The Easy Life" was made in 1962, so it was a long way from being his penultimate role.

I get him mixed up with Shelley’s other Italian husband, Tony Franciosa.

Shelley claimed, in one of her biographies, that she was attending an acting class with Lee Strasberg and while walking around the room before the class started, she was stopped by a very handsome man who seemed very familiar, but she just couldn't place the face.. She failed to recognize Vittorio until he told her that he was her ex-husband and, oh yeah, the father of her daughter.

His equally bello son was the lead in one of my fave gay imports of the 90's. Steam.

I will never understand how Shelley attracted Anyone.

Shelley had strong Sapphic MILF appeal.

R22, the difference being Vittorio was from Northern Italy, born in Genoa to a German father and Jewish Italian mother. He was a beloved and respected actor in his native Italy.

Tony was an Italian-American, whose family came from Southern Italy. He was a hothead jerk of a man, who was disliked by all who worked with him.

R23, the version I heard was about running into Franciosa in the green room of some talk show, The Tonight Show maybe?

I'll take your word for it. My sister told me the story and she is notorious for getting things wrong.

Shelley had great taste in men (if not as husbands). You've got to give her that.

Read Shelley’s two memoirs if you’re curious about her appeal. She was smart, funny, a great actress (she won two Oscars!) and friends with absolutely everyone in Hollywood. They are two of the all-time best Hollywood memoirs.

Shelley was a rarity in Golden Age Hollywood, a blonde bombshell who could actually carry on an intelligent conversation about current events, history, literature, all sorts of things. And she had a critical, questioning mind as well as a hilarious sense of humor. Most pretty young actresses were not like that.

I know she comes off very ditzy in TV interviews in the 1970s and beyond but when she was young, she was very bright and totally engaging.

As I recall Shelkey found out he was having an affair in Italy and confronted him and ended it. His mother was incredulous because that is business as usual over there ("You're the wife- you have the name!").

[quote]She was smart, funny, a great actress (she won two Oscars!) and friends with absolutely everyone in Hollywood.

And she was absolutely friendly with everyone in Hollywood with a penis. Gay or straight, she took them in.

Which straight Hollywood actor hadn’t married Shelly?

Vittorio was Jewish? How'd he avoid the Nazis - did he go into hiding?

Shelly had a lot of fun stories about her pals, and I remember that she and Elizabeth Taylor became buddies while shooting A Place in the Sun. One day Elizabeth was hanging out in Shirley's trailer gossiping and something came up and Elizabeth asked Shirley what today's date was, and Shirley told her to look at the newspaper on the coffee table, and ELizabeth picked it up and looked at it briefly and said, " no this is yesterday's paper."

Gassman makes one sound so unpleasantly gassy. I wonder why his name wasn’t Hollywood-ized into something more dashing and appealing.

[quote] Penultimate acting role that shows off his brilliance is Dino Risi's "The Easy Life."

OP, what exactly do think penultimate means?

Correction: It was, indeed, Tony Franciosa's face that Shelley failed to recognize and it was at a session at the Actor's Studio. I have been rereading "Shelley II" and I just got to that anecdote. Shelley may have misplaced that face, but apparently the dick was fantastic. Tony managed to fuck Anna Magnani, Ava Gardner and Lauren Bacall whilst wed to Shelley.

I read her bios and it’s hard to believe her attraction to men.

She was fine with takin it in the can, that covers for a multitude of sins...

Shelley was sexy and ballsy, many men like that in their women.

I highly recommend I Soliti Ignoti. A wonderful Italian comedy.

There is an interview with Lewis J Stadlen on you tube. He made a sensation when he was Groucho Marx in the musical Minnie's Boys starring Shelly more than 50 years ago. He said she was absolutely miserable to work with.

She does a great salt of the earth interview though.

What Pelosi did to Biden was pure unadulterated evil. She is a cutthroat hypocritical politician as corrupt as any extreme rightist. She treated Biden like an old piece of garbage. Sure Kamala and Tim are great if you like people who speak in banalities. They sure speak to people a lot and say absolutely nothing. Her word repetitions and circles are a joke to any intelligent human being. Get out the pom poms for the prom queen and her dimwitted consort.

R45 took a wrong left turn.

Years ago I saw SW with her daughter in NYC. She was probably in her 60s or even older but had an amazing peaches and cream complexion. I could see her as a young blonde getting lots of attention.

Would you believe he deserved an Oscar nomination for his work in The Nude Bomb?

How about a free dinner at Sizzler?

Gorgeous Vittorio. We love him here in Argentina and he loved our country and came often.

He played Stanley in the first italian production of A streetcar named desire, directed by Luchino Visconti no less, with Art Direction by Franco Zeffirelli and co starring Marcello Mastroiani as Mitch! I would sacrifice a gypsy to have been abble to see that production.

Pretty sure SW also got a piece of Brando in her prime (as in, around the time if filmibg Streetcar)...who knows what her secret was.

*his prime, but I'm sure it had to be her prime too.

R35 Jews in Italy weren't persecuted in the same way they were in Nazi occupated territorries...they had alot of rights taken away and were definitely discriminated against legally but they werent shipped into concentration camps and killed...and remember Italy surrendered in 1943, around the time the extermination of Jews really started speeding up in the other countries. So thankfully Jews in Italy were relatively safe.

Fun fact: Shelley and Tony died 5 days apart in 2006.

Shelley 8/18/1920---1/14/2006 Tony 10/25/1928--1/19/2006

Vittorio 9/1/1922---6/29/2000

R50, of course they fucked. Shelley mentions it in her book. Those two fucked everybody.

[quote]they had alot of rights taken away

Oh, dear.

Shelley pays Marlon a visit on the set of A Streetcar Named Desire.

R52 then what about the 10,000 Italian Jews exterminated in Auschwitz?

Interesting article. It does state that after Italy surrendered, the Nazis themselves occupied some cities in the north/central parts of Italy and rounded up Jews to be exterminated. But as it says here:

Italian-occupied areas were therefore relatively safe for Jews. Between 1941 and 1943, thousands of Jews escaped from German-occupied territory to the Italian-occupied zones of France, Greece, and Yugoslavia. The Italian authorities even evacuated some 4,000 Jewish refugees to the Italian mainland. Incarcerated in southern Italy, these Jewish refugees survived the war.

So it's safe to say the impact of the Holocause was lesser in this country. It even says that:

In general, these operations had limited success, due in part to advance warning given to the Jews by Italian authorities and the Vatican, and in part to the unwillingness of many non-Jewish Italians, including Salò police authorities, to participate in or facilitate the roundups.

So yeah, let's give some credits to the italians here.

Unfortunate name.

He had a big dick but it couldn’t last forever.

He had bipolar disorder.

Also about 7,500 were actually exterminated:

In all, the Germans deported 8,564 Jews from Italy, Italian-occupied France, and the islands of Rhodes and Kos, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. 1,009 returned.

My mother told me many stories about her life in Athens during WWII. There were three Jewish families in her neighborhood. My very religious Greek Orthodox grandmother was close friends of two of the families. They all left Athens to go to remote rural areas of northern Greece to avoid being rounded up. My grandmother even stored some of their belongings for them until they can return safely. One of the families did all return safely , but the other family never did. They learned several years later that the missing family wound up in one of the concentration camps, and except for one of the older children, they died of disease or malnutrition.

"The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" is a very good movie about Italian Jews during that period. Won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Directed by another Vittorio (DeSica.)