Woman who scripted many of Italy's greatest movies
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| Suso Cecchi D'Amico, pictured in 1999 |
Suso Cecchi D’Amico, the most accomplished and sought-after
screenwriter in 20th century Italian cinema, was born on this day in
1914 in Rome.
She collaborated on the scripts of more than 100 films in a
career spanning 60 years and worked with almost every Italian director of note,
particularly the pioneers of neorealism, the movement in which she was a
driving force.
The classic films in which she was involved are some of the
greatest in cinema history, including Vittorio
De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), William Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953), Mario
Monicelli's I Soliti Ignoti (1958), which was released in the United States and
Britain as Big Deal on Madonna Street, and Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano
(1962).
She also worked with Michelangelo Antonioni on Le Amiche
(The Girlfriends, 1955) and Franco Zeffirelli on Jesus of Nazareth (1977), but
she was best known for her professional relationship with Luchino Visconti, for
whom she was the major scriptwriter on almost all his films from Bellissima
(1951) to The Innocent (1976), including his acclaimed masterpieces Rocco and
His Brothers (1960) and Il Gattopardo - The Leopard (1963).
She was born Giovanna Cecchi in Rome. Just after her birth,
her father named her Susannah, of which Suso is a Tuscan diminutive. Her
mother, Leonetta Pieraccini, was a painter from a theatrical family in Tuscany,
while her father, Emilio Cecchi, from Florence, was a journalist and literary critic. They lived for a while in Ariccia, in the Castelli Romani.
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Anna Magnani and Luchino Visconti on the set
of Bellissima, scripted by Cecchi D'Amico |
For a few years in the early 1930s, her father had worked
for
Mussolini's government, running the state-backed film company, which brought
her into contact with many prominent figures from the film industry and the
theatre, including Italy's leading theatre critic,
Silvio D'Amico, whose son, Fedele,
would later become Cecchi’s husband.
Cecchi was educated in Switzerland and then at Cambridge
University before her father pulled strings to find her a job in Mussolini's ministry
of foreign trade, where she worked for seven years as a secretary and interpreter.
She left when she married, from which point she became known
as Cecchi D’Amico, although it would have been difficult for her to continue to
work for the Fascist government given Fedele’s politics.
Fedele was a prominent member of the Italian resistance
during the Second World War and edited an anti-Fascist newspaper, which meant
he had to go into hiding.
After the war, he was in poor health and went to Switzerland
for treatment for tuberculosis. With three children to raise, Cecchi D’Amico was
obliged to become the breadwinner. She helped her father translating English
literary works into Italian, including Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure and
Shakespeare plays, which in turn led her into writing scripts for the cinema. She
and her father worked together, in fact, on her first film, in 1946.
In 1947 she worked on two films directed by Luigi Zampa - Vivere in Pace (To Live in Peace) and
L'Onorevole Angelina (roughly Angelina: Member of Parliament), the latter
starring Anna Magnani, who she had met first during the filming of Roberto
Rossellini’s Rome, Open City in 1945, in which she had peripheral involvement,
and who became one of her closest friends.
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| Cecchi D'Amico with her husband, Fedele, in 1943 |
In 1948 she was one of several scriptwriters who shared
credits with De Sica and
Cesare Zavattini on
Bicycle Thieves, based on Luigi
Bartolini's novel, which followed an impoverished man who searches for his
stolen bicycle with his young son. It was Cecchi D’Amico who contributed the
moving final scene in which, in a departure from the book’s ending, the man
attempts to steal a replacement bicycle but is caught by the crowd and
humiliated in front of his son, which leads them, as it happens, to form an
even closer bond. She would later work with De Sica on another neorealist
masterpiece,
Miracle in Milan, in 1951.
She was invited to work on Roman Holiday after Wyler became
aware Ben Hecht's original script, about a princess (Audrey Hepburn) who meets
an American reporter (Gregory Peck) in Italy, failed to capture the real mood
of 1950s Rome.
Cecchi D’Amico made her first film with Visconti in 1951, a
satirical look at the film business entitled Bellisima, again starring Magnani.
Subsequently she wrote or co-wrote all Visconti's films except two.
She was popular with directors because she was content to
make creative suggestions and let them believe the ideas were their own. She
had a special relationship, both professionally and in private, with Visconti,
who generally conceived the outline of films himself but looked to Cecchi D’Amico
for suggestions and advice.
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The story of her life, Suso, aired
on Italian TV in 2007 |
She helped further the careers of many Italian stars. For
instance, the comedy
Big Deal on Madonna Street made a star of
Marcello
Mastroianni and gave
Gina Lollobrigida her first significant part.
Cecchi D’Amico scripted several projects for Mario Monicelli.
Indeed, her last work was on a Monicelli film, The Roses of the Desert (2006), a
war movie set in Libya.
Given a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film
Festival in 1995, she explained that had there been more newspapers in the
post-War years she might have been a journalist and that the neorealist
movement was in essence another way in which she and others could write stories
about the Italy they saw around them.
She died in Rome in 2010, having survived her husband by 20
years. Their three children have all made contributions to Italian cultural
life - Silvia as a film producer, Caterina in directing the Centro Sperimentale
di Cinematografia film school in Rome, and Masolino as a translator, critic and
teacher.
Masolino's daughter, Margherita, interviewed her grandmother
for the 1996 book Storie di Cinema (e d'Altro) – Stories About the Cinema (and
Other Things), the closest Cecchi D’Amico came to an autobiography. In 2007, a film about Cecchi D'Amico's life, entitled Suso, featuring conversations with Margherita and directed by the actor Luca Zingaretti was shown on Italian TV.
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| The Liceo Chateaubriand in Rome |
Travel tip:
Cecchi D’Amico went to school in Rome at the Liceo
Chateaubriand on Via di Villa Ruffo, not far from Piazza del Popolo at the start
of the fashionable Flaminio district, a chic residential area but also home to
the Auditorium Parco della Musica, a venue designed by Renzo Piano, the Maxxi
Museum of Modern Art and the Ponte della Musica, the modern foot and cycle
bridge across the Tiber.
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| A stall at the Porta Portese market |
Travel tip:
Many of the sights of Rome have been used for movie
locations but some are less well known than others. The exterior shots for Gregory Peck’s apartment
in Roman Holiday were filmed in Via Margutta, a street not far from Piazza di
Spagna and the Scalinata di Trinita dei Monti, otherwise known as the Spanish Steps, where Federico Fellini once lived.
Many of the scenes in Bicycle Thieves were shot around Porta Portese in
Trastevere, which still hosts the largest Sunday market in Rome.
