29 Facts About Luchino Visconti

Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo was an Italian filmmaker, stage director, and screenwriter.

Luchino Visconti was the recipient of many accolades, including the Palme d'Or and the Golden Lion, and many of his works are regarded as highly-influential to future generations of filmmakers.

Luchino Visconti was an accomplished stage director of plays and opera, both in Italy and abroad.

Luchino Visconti was born into a prominent noble family in Milan, one of seven children of Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone, Duke of Grazzano Visconti and Count of Lonate Pozzolo, and his wife Carla.

Luchino Visconti was formally known as Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone, and his family is a branch of the Visconti of Milan where they ruled from 1277 to 1447, initially as lords, then as dukes.

Luchino Visconti grew up in the Milanese family seat, the Palazzo Visconti di Modrone in Via Cerva, as well as on the family estate, Grazzano Visconti Castle near Vigolzone.

Luchino Visconti was baptized and raised in the Roman Catholic church.

The father, as chamberlain of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, owned a villa in Rome that Luchino Visconti later inherited and lived in for decades.

Luchino Visconti studied cello with the Italian cellist and composer Lorenzo de Paolis and met the composer Giacomo Puccini, the conductor Arturo Toscanini and the writer Gabriele D'Annunzio.

Luchino Visconti found literature by reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time, later a lifelong film project that he never realized.

An engagement concluded in 1935 with Princess Irma of Windisch-Graetz raised concerns with her father, Prince Hugo, whereupon Luchino Visconti broke it off.

Luchino Visconti accused the bourgeoisie of treason to tyranny, and following the Badoglio Proclamation, began working with the Italian resistance.

Luchino Visconti supported the communists' partisan fight at risk of death; his villa in Rome became a meeting place for oppositional artists.

Luchino Visconti helped English and American prisoners of war hide after they had escaped, and gave shelter to partisans in his house in Rome, with the help of actress Maria Denis.

Luchino Visconti was only saved from death by Denis' last-minute intervention.

Luchino Visconti began his film-making career as a set dresser on Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne through the intercession of their common friend Coco Chanel.

Together with fellow members of the Milanese film journal Cinema - Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli and Giuseppe De Santis - Luchino Visconti wrote the screenplay for his first film as director: Ossessione, one of the first neorealist movies and an unofficial adaptation of the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Luchino Visconti continued working throughout the 1950s, but he veered away from the neorealist path with his 1954 film, Senso, shot in colour.

Luchino Visconti describes the film as the "most Viscontian" of all Visconti's films.

Luchino Visconti returned to neorealism once more with Rocco e i suoi fratelli, the story of Southern Italians who migrate to Milan hoping to find financial stability.

Luchino Visconti himself came from nobility, highly educated and never in financial lack.

In fact Luchino Visconti said he felt he came from a world long ago, that of the previous century.

Luchino Visconti did not see his opulent flashbacks as an escape into imaginary, lost worlds, rather as the deciphering of signs.

Luchino Visconti wanted to put his finger on the signs of profound historical changes which will only become visible later.

Luchino Visconti searched world literature for relevant works to show the discrepancies between generations and their world views, as a task of realism in art.

In later years, Luchino Visconti made no secret of his homosexuality, though he remained a devout Catholic throughout his life.

Luchino Visconti was hostile to the Protests of 1968 and didn't even try to follow the movement and adopt the airs of a youth, like Alberto Moravia or Pier Paolo Pasolini did.

Luchino Visconti suffered a serious stroke in 1972, but continued to smoke heavily.

Luchino Visconti died in Rome of another stroke at the age of sixty-nine on 17 March 1976.