Suso Cecchi D’Amico, whose spare, literate screenplays made her a favored collaborator for directors including Vittorio De Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti and Mario Monicelli, died on Saturday in Rome. She was 96.
Franco Cristaldi (with cigarette) with Suso Cecchi D'Amice and Marcello Mastrioanni (left)Mrs. D’Amico, a translator of English literary texts, took up screenwriting at the end of World War II and put her stamp on the documentary style of storytelling that became known as neorealism.
With De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, she wrote
“The Bicycle Thief,” one of the landmarks of postwar Italian cinema. Equally at ease writing for comic and dramatic films, she went on to write or contribute to the screenplays for Visconti’s
“Rocco and His Brothers” and Monicelli’s
“Big Deal on Madonna Street.” She maintained a decadeslong collaboration with Visconti, starting with
“Bellissima” in 1951. She wrote screenplays — including for
“Senso,” “The Leopard” and
“The Innocent” — for all but two of his films.
On occasion, Hollywood beckoned. The director William Wyler hired her and the screenwriter Ennio Flaiano to introduce some badly needed Italian atmosphere into Ben Hecht’s script for
“Roman Holiday.” The experience simply reinforced her commitment to Italian film. Her work on Monicelli’s
“Casanova 70” (1965) earned Hollywood points when the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.
“Her record was astounding,” said Carlo Celli, the co-author of “A New Guide to Italian Cinema” and a professor of Italian and film studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. “She worked with absolutely everybody and in all genres: high-art cinema, popular cinema, comedies, dramas, Mafia films. And the eminent directors she worked with hit their high points with her as a screenwriter.”
Giovanna Cecchi was born on July 21, 1914, in Rome and grew up in Florence. Immediately after her birth, her father renamed her Susanna, which yielded the Tuscan nickname Suso.
The family belonged to Italy’s cultural elite. Her mother, Leonetta Pieraccini, was a painter, and her father, Emilio Cecchi, was a literary critic and essayist who in the early 1930s was appointed by the Mussolini government to run Cines, the most important film production company in Rome.
After studying in Switzerland and Britain, Ms. Cecchi worked as a secretary and translator in the ministry of foreign trade. In 1938 she married Fedele D’Amico, a leftist music critic and a founder of the Movement of Catholic Communists. He went into hiding during World War II and published an anti-Fascist newspaper. He died in 1990.
Mrs. D’Amico is survived by her three children, Silvia, Masolino and Caterina.
Working as a literary translator after the war, Mrs. D’Amico took up screenwriting in 1945 at the suggestion of the producer Carlo Ponti and the director Renato Castellani, who were interested in filming an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” “I tried, I liked it and I had fun, so I continued,” she said in an interview with Cineaste in 2002. In a 2006 interview, she offhandedly described the great cinematic movement of which she was a part as “a little group of friends who just wanted to make films and went out into the streets to do so.”
She added: “If we had as many newspapers and magazines back then as we do now, maybe many of us would have become journalists instead of making films. But there weren’t many papers and making film was inexpensive and we merely wanted to tell our stories about our experiences of that era.”
She developed her technique on the fly, combining man-in-the-street interviews with her wide literary education to create rich, memorable characters like the displaced southern Italians in
“Rocco and His Brothers.” Early on, she cultivated concision in dialogue, in part through necessity, since many of her actors were amateurs pressed into service. “We were very careful not to give them big mouthfuls or long lines, because they froze,” she told Cineaste. “They couldn’t deliver the lines.”
She and Flaiano jump-started the career of Sophia Loren when they refused to sell the screenplay for
“Too Bad She’s Bad” unless Ms. Loren was cast instead of Gina Lollobrigida.
Mrs. D’Amico wrote more than 100 screenplays over more than half a century, including those for Francesco Rosi’s
“Salvatore Giuliano,” Antonioni’s
“Girlfriends” and Franco Zeffirelli’s production of
“The Taming of the Shrew.” She considered
“City on Trial,” directed by Luigi Zampa, her best screenplay.
In the 1990s she wrote a series of screenplays for Monicelli and collaborated with Martin Scorsese on his documentary survey of Italian cinema,
“My Voyage to Italy.” In 1994 she received a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival.
“Screenwriting is the work of an artisan, not a poet,” she said in her 2006 interview. “It can be very useful, very beautiful work, work that can carry the same weight as a written story, but it cannot live on its own.”
Source: New York Times, Aug 3 2010