Vittorio Gassman; Award-Winning Italian Actor, Author and Playwright

Vittorio Gassman, the suave, matinee-handsome Italian actor who could portray Hamlet or a bumbling satirical crook with equal grace, who won awards for writing and founded and ran a traveling theater company during his six-decade international career, has died. He was 77.

Gassman, whose films included “Bitter Rice,” “Mambo” and the 1974 version of “Scent of a Woman,” died Thursday of a heart attack at his home in Rome.

Devoted to the stage and the classics, Gassman was nevertheless best known to American audiences through his films. After he became an international star in the 1949 Italian film “Bitter Rice” about migratory rice harvesters in China’s Po Valley, Gassman won an MGM contract he always preferred to forget.

The Hollywood studio cast him in early 1950s fare--opposite Yvonne DeCarlo in “Sombrero,” as a concert violinist in love with Elizabeth Taylor in “Rhapsody” and in the forgettable “Cry of the Hunted.”

“My real career started after I returned to Italy,” he told a Hollywood reporter in 1979 when he had returned here to play Agent 86’s archenemy Nino Sebastian Sleeve in “The Return of Maxwell Smart” for Universal. “I switched to comedy in films, played classics in the theater and managed to overcome my Hollywood reputation.”

Included in those early Hollywood years was a brief, stormy marriage to actress Shelley Winters, with whom he appeared in “Mambo” and with whom he had a daughter, Vittoria. Winters was quoted as complaining that Gassman “had too much ham in his Hamlet” and had “no soul--just ego.”

But Gassman, who acted in the 1956 “War and Peace,” filmed in Rome by Carlo Ponti and Dino De Laurentiis, soon made a triumphant return to American movie theaters as the satirical comedic gang leader of jewelry thieves in the 1960 “The Big Deal on Madonna Street” and as an amoral middle-aged playboy in “The Easy Life” three years later.

The latter film prompted New York critic Judith Crist to write for the New York Herald Tribune that she had a “growing suspicion that Vittorio Gassman is one of the most underrated actors around.”

Movie audiences in the last few years will remember Gassman as organized crime boss King Benny in Barry Levinson’s 1996 star-strewn film “Sleepers.”

The role of the crusty, blind retired Army officer that earned an Academy Award for Al Pacino in the 1992 remake of “Scent of a Woman” was first shaped by Gassman. Italian producers made the original film based on Giovanni Arpino’s novel in 1974, starring Gassman, who earned the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 1984, Gassman did tour with one of his plays internationally--the one-man recitation of various material titled “Viva Vittorio!” which ran for three weeks at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum.

Gassman, who appeared in 124 motion pictures and even more plays, earned many awards, including two in 1996 for his lifetime achievement--the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion and (shared with Gina Lollobrigida) the David Di Donatello Prize. The next year he received Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize for the Arts, considered the Latino equivalent of the Nobel Prize, which included a $38,000 stipend and a Joan Miro sculpture.

The actor received France’s Order of Arts and Letters in 1992.

Also a prolific writer of plays, articles and books, Gassman earned a prize in 1982 in Italy’s Bancarella literary competition for his autobiography, “A Great Future Behind You.”

He often combined his talents--acting in 1994 with his son, Alessandro, in the play “Camper” which the elder Gassman wrote.

In 1960, Gassman founded Teatro Popolare Italiano (Italian Popular Theater), complete with a portable stage, to take classic plays to people who otherwise would not have access to them.

Gassman was asked by the Vatican in 1997 to become the first in a string of celebrities to record poetry written by Pope John Paul II. Gassman, who considered himself a “lapsed Christian,” complied, although he joked that “people might start talking about my conversion.”

Born in Genoa and raised in Rome, Gassman began studying law at the University of Rome, but soon transferred to Rome’s Academy of Dramatic Art. He made his professional stage debut in 1943 and his film debut three years later. Adept at Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” “Othello” and “Macbeth,” he also portrayed Stanley Kowalski in a 1949 production of “A Steetcar Named Desire” that playwright Tennessee Williams considered the best European version of his play.

Gassman is survived by his third wife, Diletta D’Andrea, and four children.

Suffering chronically from emphysema, bronchitis, high blood pressure and depression, the cigar-smoking Gassman abandoned stage acting in February, telling his final audience ruefully:

“Death does not obsess me--it disgusts me.”