07/01/2003 - During his illustrious career, Girotti worked with Italian cinema's greatest directors, Rossellini, Visconti, Bertolucci, De Sica & Pasolini. His last film was La finestra di fronte

The funeral of veteran Italian actor, Massimo Girotti, who died in Rome on 6 January following a heart attack, will be held on 8 January in Rome’s Church of the Artists in the central Piazza del Popolo.
The body of the 84-year-old actor will lay in-state for all of today, 7 January in Rome’s Campidoglio Town Hall.
Girotti, a favourite with many of Italy’s greatest directors like Rossellini, Visconti, De Sica, Pasolini and Bertolucci was a Forties sex symbol. Girotti worked to the very end; he plays an old man suffering from loss of memory in La Finestra di fronte by Turkish-Italian director Ferzan Ozpetek, which wrapped a few weeks ago.
Massimo Girotti began his illustrious career in 1939 with a small part in Dora Nelson by Mario Soldati. The film that consecrated the remarkably handsome actor as an authentic sex symbol was Alessandro Blasetti’s 1941 La corona di ferro. In 1943, Visconti gave him his first major dramatic role in Ossessione. Girotti subsequently worked with world-renowned directors like Antonioni, De Santis, Germi, Lizzani, Lattuada, Losey, Matarazzo, Freda, and Kalatozov and his last films were Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, Giuliano Montaldo’s L'Agnese va a morire, Liliana Cavani’s Interno berlinese and Roberto Benigni’s Il mostro.

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