Federico Fellini, five-time Academy Award-winning director whose movies could be defined internationally in a single word, "Fellini-esque," died Sunday in a Rome hospital two weeks after he fell into a coma. He was 73.
Fellini, who suffered heart failure and went into a coma Oct. 17, died at Umberto Primo Hospital of cardiac arrest. His brain stopped functioning Thursday and doctors abandoned hope for his recovery. He had been ill since a stroke in August.
"An immense void remains in the richness of Italian art," Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro said in a message to actress Giulietta Masina, who observed the 50th anniversary of her wedding to Fellini only Saturday.
"A great light has gone out," said actress Sophia Loren from her California ranch.
Actor Marcello Mastroianni, whom Fellini cast as the archetypal Latin lover in "La Dolce Vita" and who starred in many of his other films, grasped for words: "How can I capture in a comment the genius of a director and my sincere friendship with him? It would be better to reflect in order to understand how great this man was."
In Los Angeles, Directors Guild of America President Gene Reynolds said: "Fellini was an uncompromising genius, individualistic, drawing from the storehouse of his own personal experience. He was courageous, always in pursuit of the truth, instinctive and surprising. We've lost a poet in film."
The term "Fellini-esque," coined from the Italian filmmaker's name, evokes an orgy of rich, roiling carnival-like imagery, leering gargoyle faces and sumptuous decadence. But this phantasmagoria is by no means all that Fellini conjured up in his directorial career.
His legend began with such early classics as "La Strada," which in 1954 won him his first Oscar, and "Nights of Cabiria," which won him another in 1957.
His reputation grew through the scandalous "La Dolce Vita" in 1960, which was condemned by the Vatican as obscene because of its portrayal of decadence and promiscuity, but which won the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes.
His masterpiece "8 1/2" and "Amarcord" won him two more Oscars in 1963 and 1974. His final films, "L' Intervista" ("The Interview") and "The Voice of the Moon," brought to a close a career in which the artist's stream of consciousness reached full flood.
Fellini was honored last March with a special Academy Award for lifetime achievement.
Il maestro (Italian for "the master" ) or il mago ("the magician") was born Jan. 20, 1920, in the provincial town of Rimini on the Adriatic Coast. It was to be the location--either real or imagined--for some of his most resonant movies, including the 1953 "I Vitelloni," his first international success, and, much later, "Amarcord."
Although Fellini once described his middle-class childhood in an interview as being exceptionally happy, his rebellions started early. As a boy of 7, or perhaps 12 (Fellini was always mischievously vague about the particulars of his autobiography) he briefly ran away with a traveling circus, returning to his parents within several days. The escapade opened his eyes to the tawdry magic of show business and set in motion one of his great passions--the circus as a metaphor for life's experiences.
Another of his passions was fired when he was sent to a private boys academy 30 miles north of Rimini and incurred the wrath of the priests he mercilessly caricatured in sketches. (He was taught obedience by kneeling on kernels of dried corn.)
Heading for Florence in 1938, Fellini worked as a proofreader and newspaper comic-strip cartoonist, then moved on to Rome, intending to become a famous journalist.
Instead, he wrote satirical magazine pieces and radio comedy sketches and then hooked up with a group of bohemian writers and actors, including Aldo Fabrizi. The two set out on a countrywide tour of Italy with a traveling vaudeville troupe, where Fellini did everything from writing gags to painting sets.
Fellini described this period for The Saturday Evening Post in 1966: "That was perhaps the most important year of my life. I was overwhelmed by the variety of the country's physical landscape and, too, by the variety of its human landscape. It was the kind of experience that few young men are fortunate enough to have--a chance to discover the character . . . of one's own country and, at the same time, to discover one's own identity."
When Fabrizi was given the lead role in a movie, the 1942 "Come On In, There's Room," Fellini was hired as a scriptwriter, and soon he was regularly scripting comedies.
A year later he met and married Masina, to whom he was first attracted after hearing her voice on a radio comedy series for which he had written. Masina was to become the star of some of his finest movies, most famously "Nights of Cabiria," where she played a waif-like prostitute, and "La Strada," where her moon-faced, clown-like Gelsomina was opposite Anthony Quinn's brutal strongman Zampano.
