26th November 2018
Bernardo Bertolucci, Last Tango in Paris director, dies aged 77 (theguardian.com).
Bernardo Bertolucci, the multi-award-winning Italian director of Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor and The Dreamers, has died at the age of 77 after a spell with cancer, his publicist confirmed. He had been confined to a wheelchair for over a decade, after surgery on a herniated disc in 2003 was unsuccessful and rendered him unable to walk.
Of course, for many he will always be most famous for the infamous anal with butter as lubricant rape scene featuring Marlon Brandon and Maria Schneider in 1972’s Last Tango in Paris—the filming of which it seems indeed left Schneider feeling humiliated and raped by both actor and director (independent.co.uk, Dec. 2016)—but his real tour de force was his 300-minute 1987 British-Italian epic The Last Emperor with a cast including Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu and Burt Lancaster, and having secured unprecedented permission to film inside Beijing’s Forbidden City, the palatial complex of China’s Emperors until 1912.
#RIPBernardoBertolucci (Instagram).
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