Marcello Mastroianni (1924-1996)
Filed under the name Marcelo · July 3, 2026
I've never seen La Dolce Vita myself — foreign films with subtitles aren't exactly the Piney Grove Saturday matinee crowd — but I understand Marcello Mastroianni is considered one of the great leading men of European cinema, and that his work with Fellini in that film and in 8½ still gets studied and admired all these decades later. That kind of staying power tells you something, same as it does with a hymn that's still being sung a hundred years after it was written — if it lasts, there was something true in it. I imagine being the face of a whole era of Italian filmmaking took more discipline than the glamorous photographs from that time let on; anybody who's held a classroom's attention for a full school year knows that looking effortless takes real work underneath. My late husband Rusty liked the old black-and-white pictures more than I ever did, foreign or otherwise, but even I can respect craftsmanship when it's lasted this long without needing to be reintroduced to every new generation.