Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni (September 28, 1924 – December 19, 1996) was an Italian film actor.
During his career, Mastroianni had won or been nominated multiple times for awards such as Coppa Volpi, Cannes Film Festival Best Actor Award, BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, David di Donatello for Best Actor, Nastro d'Argento, Sant Jordi Award, Golden Globe Award for Best Actor as well as being nominated three times for Academy Award for Best Actor.
Born in Fontana Liri, a small village in the Apennines, Mastroianni grew up in Turin and Rome. During World War II, he was interned in a Nazi prison, but he escaped and hid in Venice.
In 1945, he started working for a film company and began taking acting lessons. His film debut was in I Miserabili (1947). He soon became a major international star, starring in Big Deal on Madonna Street; and in Federico Fellini's La dolce vita with Anita Ekberg in 1960, where he played a disillusioned and self-loathing tabloid columnist who spends his days and nights exploring Rome's high society.
Mastroianni followed La dolce vita with another signature role, that of a film director who, amidst self-doubt and troubled love affairs, finds himself in a creative block while making a movie in Fellini's 8½.
Mastroianni was married to Italian actress Flora Carabella (1926 - 1999) from 1948 until his death. They had one child together, Barbara. His brother Ruggero Mastroianni (1929 - 1996) was a highly regarded film editor who not only edited a number of his brother's films, but appeared alongside Marcello in Scipione detto anche l'Africano, a sword and sandals film released in 1971.
He also had a daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, with the actress Catherine Deneuve, his longtime lover during the seventies. Both Flora and Catherine were at his bedside when he died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 72, as was his partner at the time, author and filmmaker Anna Maria Tato. According to Christopher Wiegand and Paul Duncan in their book Federico Fellini, when Mastroianni died in 1996, the Trevi Fountain, which is so famously associated with him due to his role in Fellini's La dolce vita, was symbolically turned off and draped in black as a tribute.
Mastroianni and Jack Lemmon are the only actors to have twice won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival. Mastroianni won in 1970 for Dramma della gelosia - tutti i particolari in cronaca and in 1987 for Dark Eyes.
