Bernardo Bertolucci, Last Tango in Paris director,  dies aged 77

Bernardo Bertolucci, the multi-award-winning Italian director of Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor and The Dreamers, has died at the age of 77 after a spell with cancer, his publicist confirmed.

He had been confined to a wheelchair for over a decade, after surgery on a herniated disc in 2003 was unsuccessful and rendered him unable to walk, the Guardian reports.

In a film-making career that stretched back to the early 60s, Bertolucci became a key figure of the extraordinary Italian new wave (alongside, and the equal of, Antonioni, Fellini, and Pasolini) but – uniquely – made a successful transition to large-scale Hollywood film-making with 1987’s The Last Emperor, which won nine Oscars, including best picture and best director for Bertolucci.

Bertolucci was born in Parma in 1941, the son of a poet and teacher, and was raised in a literary and artistic atmosphere. His father Attilio was friends with Pier-Paolo Pasolini, then a novelist and poet, and Pasolino hired the 20-year-old Bertolucci as his assistant on his 1961 debut, Accattone. This proved to be Bertolucci’s big break: Pasolini helped him further by recommending him as the scriptwriter for La Commare Secca (The Skinny Gossip aka The Grim Reaper), which became Bertolucci’s directorial debut in 1962.

Bertolucci continued to contribute as a writer and ideas man, notably on Sergio Leone’s epic spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West. But his directorial career took off with Before the Revolution (1964), a Parma-set account of a Marxist student’s affair with his aunt, and the highly influential The Conformist (1970), both of which foregrounded Bertolucci’s commitment to radical leftwing politics. “I lived in a kind of dream of communism,” he later remarked.