(2 of 2)
But Mastroianni was also a clown, yelping like a hyena in heat when Sophia Loren (his partner in 13 films) strips for him in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963). As the Sicilian aristocrat in Pietro Germi's wonderfully malicious Divorce Italian Style (1962), he is a creature of tics and slouches, plotting his wife's death and stalking the seraphic Stefania Sandrelli with the gait of a mopey Groucho. He made informed fun not only of these familiar Italian comic figures but also of his own star machismo. At the end of a guest stint on Laugh-In, TV's vaudeville for the Nixon years, he stared moonily into the camera, then yanked off his toupee, revealing a few vagrant strands of hair. The ardor, the bedroom voice, the coiffure--it's all pretend, see? Acting!
And act he did, in a surprising variety of roles over the decades: as the soft-spoken labor leader in The Organizer (1963), the homosexual fighting Fascism in A Special Day (1977), the Chekhovian philanderer in Dark Eyes (1987), the gentle padrone besotted by a dwarf in the Argentine I Don't Want to Talk About It (1993), his finest late role. He worked with ambitious auteurs from Altman to Zurlini; he lent his bankability to obscure projects. In his last year he starred with Chiara in Three Lives and Only One Death, an elaborate jape by the Paris-based Chilean Raul Ruiz, and appeared with fellow icon Jeanne Moreau in a sweet vignette--a poignant farewell kiss--in Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds.
While Mastroianni worked and wooed around the world, his one and only wife of 46 years stoically stayed home. "Perhaps I don't be so faithful," he said in 1987. "Whoever lives with an actor has to accept that he needs to live a little in his fantasies." Perhaps Flora accepted him, as moviegoers did, for the contradictory beguiler he was.
At the end of the three-hour carouse of La Dolce Vita, Marcello sees a beautiful girl on a beach. She has something important to tell him, but he can't quite hear her and he must join his reveling friends. As the movies' most famous Latin lover since Valentino walks away, the girl smiles benignly. She might have been in the Trevi Fountain crowd last week, recalling an actor who displayed the foibles of modern man, and the grace and gravity with which one man can bear them.