Film director and writer best known for The Last Emperor and Last Tango in Paris

Born: March 16, 1941;

Died: November 26, 2018

BERNARDO Bertolucci, who has died aged 77, won the Best Director Oscar for The Last Emperor in 1988, but it was for Last Tango in Paris a decade earlier that he attracted most attention and controversy.

Morality campaigners and tabloid newspapers pushed for the banning of Bertolucci’s tale of a depersonalised sexual relationship between a recently widowed, middle-aged American, played by Marlon Brando - fresh from his Oscar success with The Godfather - and a young French woman, played by the relatively unknown 19-year-old Maria Schneider.

However, many reputable critics lauded the film as a serious work on a serious subject and when the British censors sat down to consider it they found nothing that contravened their rules.

The infamous sodomy scene, which begins with Brando ordering Schneider to get the butter from the kitchen, proved less graphic than many anticipated. The film was passed in January 1973 with an adults-only X certificate and only ten seconds of cuts, which the censor James Ferman later admitted were made as a purely political decision to try to appease self-appointed moral guardian Mary Whitehouse and her legion.

Last Tango was banned by about 50 British local authorities, who could overrule the national censors without bothering to watch the film, and in many overseas countries, including the director’s native Italy, where Bertolucci was given a four-month suspended jail sentence for “offending public decency”. Both Bertolucci and Brando were nominated for Oscars.

There was further controversy in 2007 when Schneider said she felt humiliated and “a little raped” by Bertolucci and Brando during the sodomy scene. Some misinterpreted the comment to mean she was claiming she was raped. She did know of the scene in advance, but Bertolucci admitted she did not know about the butter until just before the scene was shot because he wanted her reaction to Brando’s orders “as a girl, not as an actress”.

The ongoing controversies over Last Tango have overshadowed a directorial career that includes several films that have been praised as masterpieces by critics (or at least some critics), including The Conformist (1970), a drama set in Fascist Italy. Some of his films, including Last Tango, have split critical opinion.

The Last Emperor, in which Peter O’Toole played Reginald Johnston, the real-life Edinburgh-born tutor of the young Chinese emperor Pu Yi, won nine Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and a second Oscar for Bertolucci for Best Adapted Screenplay, though few would argue that it was Bertolucci’s best work.

Bertolucci was born into an artistic family in Parma in 1941. His father was a poet, art historian and film critic and Bertolucci himself won acclaim as a young man for his own poetry. As a child, he loved the whole experience of going to the cinema and by his mid-teens he was also making his own little 16mm films.

Through his father Bertolucci got to know Pier Paolo Pasolini, who also attracted attention as a poet before becoming a film-maker. Pasolini hired Bertolucci as assistant director when he directed the film Accattone (1961).

Bertolucci’s first feature film La Commare Seca – The Grim Reaper (1962), was based on a story by Pasolini. Bertolucci both wrote and directed the film, in which an unseen detective investigates the murder of a prostitute. Several different characters talk about their presence at the scene of the crime, with each episode filmed in a different style.

Bertolucci was only 21 at the time and critics hailed the arrival of a major new film-maker. A decade later he was being courted by American studios and working with major Hollywood stars following the huge international success of Last Tango. His 1976 film 1900 was a sprawling historical drama with a cast that included Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Burt Lancaster and Donald Sutherland. Some versions run to over five hours.

It was made with the involvement of Paramount Pictures. Bertolucci clashed with producer Alberto Grimaldi who locked him out of the editing suite and set about producing a much shorter version. The film got mixed reviews and failed to repeat the success of Last Tango.

Another decade passed and several more films and he was back in Hollywood’s good books with The Last Emperor, followed by the underrated and visually beautiful The Sheltering Sky (1990), with John Malkovich and Debra Winger, Little Buddha (1993), Stealing Beauty (1996) and The Dreamers (2003), in which a brother and sister are involved in a menage a trois. Attitudes had changed since Last Tango – there was little controversy and little interest.

Sex and politics were recurring themes in his work, though Bertolucci insisted that he was not trying to deliver any messages in his films and that he left that to the Post Office. He suffered from depression and anxiety attacks and was in analysis for years.

His first two marriages, to actress Adriana Asti and Last Tango’s set designer Maria Paola Maino, ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, Clare Peploe, the British scriptwriter, with whom he worked on several films.

BRIAN PENDREIGH