He died in Paris, attended by his longtime love Catherine Deneuve and their daughter Chiara. But Marcello Mastroianni's compatriots would not let the actor known as "the face of Italy" pass into memory without a poetic farewell. So just after sunset on the day he succumbed, at 72, to pancreatic cancer, his wife Flora stood with the mayor of Rome and 500 other mourners at the Trevi Fountain, into whose waters Anita Ekberg had lured Mastroianni in the famous scene from Federico Fellini's 1960 La Dolce Vita. Now the lights faded, the water from the Neptune statue stopped, a lone flutist played the theme from 8 1/2 as two black drapes were stretched over the fountain. It was a last token of love to a man who was imperfect and irresistible.
That was Mastroianni: the postheroic hero, defining the European male in all his charm, complexity, failure. Husband and lover, actor and movie star, deft comedian and suavest delineator of atomic-age anomie--there was a Marcello for every sexual taste, every moral mood. And he loved being those people; that's why he kept at it for a half-century, in more than 120 pictures. "When I make films," he said in 1987, "I am absolutely happy. And when the film is finished, I am looking for another film. Otherwise my life is a little more bored."
His life, from the beginning, was hardly boring. Born in Fontana Liri, 50 miles outside Rome, to a carpenter who went blind and a housewife who went deaf ("They were like a comic couple," he said), Mastroianni did time in a German labor camp during World War II, then escaped to Venice and later to Luchino Visconti's famed Milan theater troupe. The screen had to claim this face, so sensitive, masculine and alert, but it took a decade or more for him to achieve true Marcellosity. In Visconti's rapturous White Nights (1957), Mastroianni spent the whole movie pleading fruitlessly for Maria Schell's love. To impress her he does a spaz-jazz dance, hilarious in its frantic clumsiness. At the end he walks off like Chaplin, alone into the snowy dawn.
It was an older, world-weary image--a touch of gray at the temples, a wistfulness for waylaid innocence--that made Mastroianni a worldwide star. As the Dolce Vita gossipist, the moviemaker in Fellini's great 8 1/2 (1963) and the writer in Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte (1961), he moved like a man in perpetual postcoital ennui, elevating spiritual passivity to a metaphysic and a fashion statement. "Mastroianni" became a kind of emotional cologne for the modern male. And no one wore the style as elegantly as he: the dark suit, the narrow tie, the eyes of a man who's been up three nights straight doing things that would excite anyone but him. These art films won international success because of his effortless allure. La Notte, with its blank walls and arid stares, was withal an essay in star quality. We could happily watch Marcello being unhappy, doing anything or nothing. He was charisma in lethargy.