The Alberto Sordi Museum and
Foundation said Friday it would hold a show marking the 100th
anniversary of his birth in the great actor's Roman villa from
March to June this year.
The foundation proposed the exhibit and the administration of
Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi agreed to it, the foundation said.
The show will be in "various areas of the villa," the
foundation said.
It will be a multimedia show.
A pavilion set up in the square in front of the villa will
show various Sordi films for free.
Veteran comic actor Sordi died on February 25 2003 at the
age of 82.
Known affectionately to his fellow Romans as Albertone (Big
Albert), Sordi was an icon of Italian comic cinema, playing in
some 200 films in a career that spanned almost 65 years and
covered the golden age of the country's post-war cinema.
While best known for humorous portrayals that played up his
Roman accent, Sordi gave some memorable performances in more
dramatic roles and even stepped behind the camera, directing
almost 20 films as well as collaborating on the screenplays of
many more.
Born in Rome on June 15, 1920 (although some sources give
his birth year as 1919), Sordi showed a passion and talent for
the stage at an early age.
He began acting in amateur theatre productions when he was
12 and a year later, as a podgy teenager, was discovered in an
Oliver Hardy impersonation competition sponsored by Hollywood's
MGM.
In 1937, while studying acting at Rome's Academy of
Dramatic Arts and playing cabaret in the capital's music halls,
Sordi made his screen debut with a small part in Il Feroce
Saladino, a film directed by Mario Bonnard.
A slightly more substantial role followed in 1938, with the
costume drama La Principessa Tarakanova by Mario Soldati and
Fyodor Otsep.
In the 1940s, he began working in radio, keeping up the
Hardy connection by dubbing the American comedian's voice into
Italian.
Laurel and Hardy comedies were among the few Hollywood
efforts not banned by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and
Sordi's version of 'Ollie', which involved speaking Italian with
a broad English accent, was an instant hit, entering Italian
popular culture and winning the actor national recognition.
After a string of comic and dramatic parts that chronicled
and mirrored post-war Italy, Sordi's film career finally took
off in 1952, when directing legend Federico Fellini picked him
for one of the leads in Lo Sceicco Bianco (The White Sheik).
Fellini returned to Sordi for his next film I Vitelloni
(1953), in which the actor's portrayal of an overaged adolescent
won him star status.
In 1954, Sordi created one of his best-known characters -
Nando Moriconi in Steno's cult film Un Americano A Roma starring
Ursula Andress. Sordi plays a childish young Roman whose dream
is to live the American way of life, leading to the farcical
pretence that he is a native of Kansas city.
Sordi, who collaborated on the script of the movie, was
subsequently invited to the US where he was made an honorary
citizen of Kansas City.
Another memorable role was in Il Conte Max, by Giorgio
Bianchi, in which Sordi played alongside matinee idol and
award-winning neorealist director Vittorio De Sica.
A remake of the 1937 hit movie Il Signor Max, Sordi takes
the part that was played by De Sica in the original - that of a
Rome newspaper vendor who unsuccessfully attempts to shed his
working-class roots and enter the world of the well-to-do.
Sordi went on to dominate the 'Commedia all'Italiana'
genre, his good-natured fun-poking at the shortcomings of
the petit bourgeois establishing him as the comic conscience of
the Italian people.
His trademark role was that of the flawed lower-middle
class Roman, who manages to win the audience over despite or
because of his foibles and vices.
At a presentation last year focusing on his long career,
Sordi stressed that "my films were deliberate and never chosen
at random. They had to reflect the reality of Italian life."
"I began offering my own stories based on what I saw around
me. I tried to show up in a funny way our personal vices and
those of our institutions," he said.
This helps explain his refusal to attempt a career in
Hollywood. Although he played opposite David Niven in the war
film The Best of Enemies (1962) and was the stereotyped Italian
pilot in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965),
he turned down most English-language offers including one from
American director Billy Wilder.
"I prefer to recount Italian customs and habits and so I
refused Wilder and similar offers from abroad," Sordi told
reporters recently.
Among his more 'serious' roles, Sordi is remembered for his
part as the coward-turned-hero in Mario Monicelli's acclaimed
1959 war film La Grande Guerra (The Great War).
Monicelli made use of Sordi's dramatic talents again in his
1977 film Un Borghese Piccolo Piccolo (An Average Little Man),
featuring Albertone as a meek and mild middle-aged man who takes
justice into his own hands after his only son is killed in an
armed robbery.
Sordi accumulated numerous awards in his long career,
including a Golden Globe in 1964; the Silver Bear at the 1986
Berlin Film Festival; a David, Italy's equivalent of the Oscar,
in 1994 for his career; a Golden Lion for career achievement
from the Venice Film Festival, and the Charlot (Charlie Chaplin)
award for his work in comedy.
Sordi's directing ventures failed to win the acclaim
accorded him for his work in front of the camera. The last movie
in which he appeared, the 1998 romantic comedy Incontri Proibiti
with Italian starlet Valeria Marini, was directed and co-written
by Sordi but failed to do well at the box office.
Legendary Italian actress Sophia Loren today paid a moving
tribute to Sordi, who co-starred with her in the 1954 Mario
Mattoli film Two Nights with Cleopatra.
"The death of Alberto is one of the saddest things of my
life," said the 68-year-old screen beauty.
"He was one of our greatest ever comic actors and leaves
behind a nostalgic and melancholic longing for past times," she
said.
Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni highlighted Sordi's status as
the Roman par excellence, saying the city's inhabitants would
deeply "mourn and miss an artist who more than any other
interpreted with intelligence and love the richness of life and
the contradictions of our society."
On his 80th birthday, in June 2000, Rome city hall paid
tribute to the perennial bachelor by making him mayor for the
day.
In seeking to explain the secret of his success and
popularity, Sordi told his fans last year that "I have been no
virtuoso but I have known how to talk in a natural way as
ordinary people do.
"I am not the type of actor who can be given orders on how
to move and what to wear. A typical actor puts himself at the
disposal of others. Not I, never, not because I am conceited or
spoiled but because I would not be able to play a character."
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