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Agence France-Presse

Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci, whose films include The Last Emperor, Last Tango in Paris and 1900, has died in Rome aged 77, Italian media said on Monday.
Considered one of the giants of Italian and world cinema, Bertolucci was the only Italian ever to win the Oscar for best film, snapping up the award in 1988 for The Last Emperor.

The biographical masterpiece about the last Chinese emperor won a total of nine Oscars, all of those for which it was nominated. It was the first film authorised by the Chinese government to be filmed in the Forbidden City.
Secrets of the last emperor
He acquired notoriety for his 1972 erotic drama Last Tango In Paris starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider which featured a controversial sex scene involving butter.
He had been wheelchair-bound for several years and won an honorary Palme d’Or for his life’s work at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

Former festival president Gilles Jacob said he was saddened by the death of “the last emperor of Italian cinema, the lord of all epics and all escapades”.
“The party is over: it takes two to tango,” Jacob said.
Born in Parma, northeastern Italy, in 1941, Bertolucci made films that were often highly politicised, dealing with workers’ struggles in 1900 or the fate of left-wingers in fascist Italy in The Conformist.
Filmmakers seek box office boom with Chinese co-productions, but success is not guaranteed
In Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci acknowledged Schneider was not aware that Brando’s character would use butter as a lubricant during the scene in which the actor simulates anally penetrating his lover, played by then 19-year-old Schneider.
“The only new thing was the idea of the butter. It was this, I learned many years later, that upset Maria, and not the violence that was in the scene and was envisaged in the script of the film.
“It is both consoling and distressing that anyone could be so naive to believe that what happens on the cinema screen actually takes place,” he said of viewers.

Schneider, who suffered drug addiction and depression before her 2011 death, said four years earlier she felt “a little raped” during the scene and was profoundly angry about it for years afterwards.
When asked in 2013 how he would like to be remembered, Bertolucci said: “I don’t care.”
Last Tango in Paris rape scene revelation sparks outrage
“I think my movies are there, people can see them,” he said at a presentation of a 3D version of The Last Emperor to mark the 25th anniversary of its international release. “And sometimes I laugh, thinking I will be remembered more as a talent scout of young girls than as a film director.”
The list of starlets he discovered includes Dominique Sanda in The Conformist in 1970s, the passionate Schneider in Last Tango in Paris (1972), Liv Tyler in 1996’s Stealing Beauty and Eva Green, who made her screen debut in The Dreamers in 2003.


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Obituaries

‘Last Emperor’, ‘Last Tango In Paris’ director Bernardo Bertolucci dies

Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci. Photo: Alamy

FILE -- in this Nov. 19, 2013 file photo, Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, center, with Hollywood Chamber of Commerce President/CEO Leron Gubler, second right, and Heather Cochran, right, Hollywood Chamber of Commerce Chair of the Board, holds a star plaque at a ceremony in his honor as he makes a rare visit to his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in Los Angeles, USA. Bertolucci, who won Oscars with "The Last Emperor" and whose erotic drama "Last Tango in Paris" enthralled and shocked the world, has died at the age of 77. Bertolucci's press office, Punto e Virgola, confirmed the death Monday, Nov. 26, 2018, in an email to The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci embraces the actress Thandie Newton as they pose for photographers 20 September in San Sebastian. Bertolucci's latest movie "Besieged" was presented at the Film Festival here.

Handout film still showing actor John Lone acts as Chinese last emperor Pu Yi in Bernardo Bertolucci's film "The last Emperor".

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Filmmaker was only Italian to win an Oscar for best film, for 1988’s ‘The Last Emperor’, the first movie made in Beijing’s Forbidden City



Filmmaker was the only Italian to win an Oscar for best film, for 1988’s ‘The Last Emperor’, the first movie made in Beijing’s Forbidden City.


Cinema

‘Last Emperor’, ‘Last Tango In Paris’ director Bernardo Bertolucci dies

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;} Filmmaker was only Italian to win an Oscar for best film, for 1988’s ‘The Last Emperor’, the first movie made in Beijing’s Forbidden City

Filmmaker was only Italian to win an Oscar for best film, for 1988’s ‘The Last Emperor’, the first movie made in Beijing’s Forbidden City