| Subject: Suso Cecchi D'Amico, screenwriter |
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July 31, 2010
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Date Posted: Tuesday, July 31, 2012, 09:14:22pm
The Italian screenwriter Suso Cecchi d'Amico, who has died aged 96, collaborated on the scripts of more than 100 films, including Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di Biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), William Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953), Mario Monicelli's I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958) and Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano (1962). She also worked with Michelangelo Antonioni on Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955) and Franco Zeffirelli on Jesus of Nazareth (1977), but she was best known for her creative contribution to the films of Luchino Visconti, including Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963).
She was born Giovanna Cecchi in Rome to a Tuscan painter, Leonetta Pieraccini, and the literary critic Emilio Cecchi, a major figure in 20th-century Italian letters. For a few years in the early 1930s, before the Cinecittà studios were built in Rome, her father had been entrusted by Mussolini's government with running the state-backed film company Cines. "We Cecchi children were excited by Daddy's new job because we all loved the movies," Suso said. Many film people were among the literati who frequented the family home. Italy's leading theatre critic, Silvio d'Amico, was a regular visitor. His son Fedele (known as Lele), a musicologist, married Suso in 1938.
In the early 1930s, when it wasn't fashionable for young Italian girls to study abroad, Suso's father had sent her first to Switzerland and then to Cambridge. On her return to Italy, she got a job as a civil servant and, thanks to her language skills, worked for eight years as an interpreter-secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Trade. During the second world war Lele had to go into hiding because of his anti-fascist activities. He later suffered bad health, making it necessary for Suso to become the breadwinner. She translated English texts, including Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure and Shakespeare plays, and went on to translate plays staged by Visconti.
The first script on which she worked, for the producer Carlo Ponti and director Renato Castellani, was never filmed. But with Castellani (and five others) she got her first credit immediately afterwards, with Mio Figlio Professore (My Son, the Professor, 1946), followed in 1947 by two films directed by Luigi Zampa, Vivere in Pace (To Live in Peace) and L'Onorevole Angelina (Angelina: Member of Parliament), the latter starring Anna Magnani, who became one of Suso's closest friends. In the same year she co-scripted Alberto Lattuada's Il Delitto di Giovanni Episcopo (Flesh Will Surrender), from Gabriele d'Annunzio's novel, which was also one of Federico Fellini's early script credits.
In 1948 she was one of several scriptwriters who shared credits with De Sica and Cesare Zavattini on Bicycle Thieves, based on Luigi Bartolini's novel, which followed an impoverished man who searches for his stolen bicycle with his young son. Suso recalled: "Zavattini would have probably ended the film like the book, with the father and son returning home defeated. I suggested the idea of the father in desperation trying to steal a bike himself ... After being humiliated in front of the kid, a new bond is born between them." Suso never claimed credit as an "auteur" and said: "I'm just an artisan, the author is the director."
Sometimes her craftsmanship was not given its due. Wyler was aware that Ben Hecht's original script for Roman Holiday, about a princess (Audrey Hepburn) who meets an American reporter (Gregory Peck) in Italy, failed to capture the real mood of 1950s Rome. Suso and Ennio Flaiano were hired for an uncredited rewrite. "They wanted us to work in an office at the studios," she said, "as the hack rewriters do in Hollywood, but we said it would make us the laughing stock of Cinecittà. So they let us work at home."
Suso said Wyler appreciated their ideas, such as letting Hepburn sleep in Peck's room and don his pyjamas, then a daring touch for Hollywood movies. Her presence at scriptwriting sessions was a great comfort to directors who did not want writers to interfere too much but were grateful for creative suggestions. She had a special relationship, both professionally and in private, with Visconti although they always used the formal "Lei" when addressing each other. Their films together included Bellissima (1951), Senso (1954), Rocco e i suoi Fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960) and Ludwig (1972). According to Suso, the outline of Visconti's films, especially the literary adaptations, was established by the director himself. The Leopard, based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel about the Sicilian aristocracy, was divided into three parts, including a final ballroom sequence, representing the decline and death of Prince Salina (Burt Lancaster), who has secured a profitable marriage for his nephew (Alain Delon) to a merchant's daughter (Claudia Cardinale). The film omits the book's epilogue, set 20 years later.
Suso believed that if Albert Camus's widow had allowed the crucial structural changes that Visconti wanted in the first part of his adaptation of L'Étranger (The Stranger), the resulting film (Lo Straniero, 1967) would have been more successful. For his projected adaptation of Marcel Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), Visconti wanted to deal with only two sections of the novel, the tormented love stories between the narrator (to be played by Delon) and Albertine; and between Baron de Charlus (with whom, according to Suso, Visconti identified) and Morel (to be played by Helmut Berger).
Apart from Visconti, the two directors with whom Suso worked most frequently were Luigi Comencini and Monicelli. Her work with Comencini included his excellent TV adaptation of Elsa Morante's La Storia (History, 1986). She co-scripted many films for Monicelli including Casanova 70 (1965), which starred Marcello Mastroianni and received an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.
In 1994 Suso was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice film festival. Lele died in 1990 but Suso had the comfort of three children who survive her and have made important contributions to Italian cultural life: Silvia as a film producer, Caterina in directing the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia film school in Rome, and Masolino, a translator, critic and teacher. Masolino's daughter, Margherita, interviewed her grandmother for the 1996 book Storie di Cinema (e d'Altro) – Stories About the Cinema (and Other Things), the closest Suso came to an autobiography.
• Suso Cecchi d'Amico (Giovanna Cecchi), screenwriter, born 21 July 1914; died 31 July 2010
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