Italy's celebrated screen-writer Cecchi D'Amico dies at 96

Jul 31, 2010, 12:33 GMT

Rome - Screenwriter Suso Cecchi D'Amico, who emerged from Italy's male-dominated post-war cinema boom to contribute to some of its most celebrated films, including Bicycle Thieves, died Saturday. She was 96.

Her death was announced by relatives who said D'Amico had been ill for some time, the ANSA newsagency reported.

In Bicycle Thieves, D'Amico together with director Vittorio De Sica and fellow screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, helped craft one of the finest examples of what has become known as the neo-realist school of cinema.

The 1948 film's final, heart-wrenching scene, when the protagonist Antonio attempts to steal a bicycle, but is caught and humiliated by a crowd in front of his young son, was penned by D'Amico.

Despite her considerable literary skills, D'Amico saw her screenwriting as serving cinema's main purpose, which according to her was a visual one, Italian film critic Paolo Mereghetti said Saturday.

For her, in film 'one does not seek to find words, but words must follow images,' Mereghetti said, paying homage to D'Amico. He described hear as one of Italy's 'greaters screenwriters'.

Born in Rome in 1914 D'Amico grew up in an intellectual household where her father, Emilio Cecchi, was a renowned literary critic and her mother, Leonetta Pieraccini, was a painter.

In 1938 she married a music expert, Fedele D'Amico, who during World War II joined the anti-fascist underground. During this period she took refuge in a family farmhouse in Tuscany and worked on translating texts from English and French.

In 1946 D'Amico won her first screen-writing credit for Renato Castellani's My Son the Professor.

Her breakthrough coincided with the dawn of one of the brightest periods in Italian cinema, when the stark, gritty narratives of neorealism replaced the propagandistic epics and the insipid comedies churned out during the fascist-era.

D'Amico won her first national film award, a Nastro Argento, in 1947, for the screenplay of Luigi Zampa's To Live in Peace. The story is of quiet village life disrupted by the events of World War II.

Three years later with Bellissima, a satire on the film industry, she worked with director Luchino Visconti with whom she was to establish a long and fruitful creative partnership.

Films with Visconti included Senso in 1954 and the 1963 epic The Leopard, which was adapted from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel of the same name. The film starred Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale.

A versatile writer at ease with both drama and comedy, D'Amico's last credit appeared in 2006 for the Roses of the Desert a war movie set in the Libyan desert and directed by Mario Monicelli.

'We were like family,' the 95-year-old Monicelli said on Saturday, recalling Cecchi D'Amico. The two first worked together five decades ago, a collaboration that produced more than a dozen films.

'Her passing leaves me feeling very lonely, but we have to bend to the passing years,' Monicelli said.