Thirty years ago, on October 27, 1990, Ugo Tognazzi died in Rome. He was the first to die among the actors who in the fifties, sixties and seventies had become known and highly appreciated for their roles in Italian comedy, showing themselves as excellent comic masks and, often, also as excellent dramatic interpreters. A group of actors all born in the twenties of the twentieth century and of which from time to time, and with variable composition, are referred to as the “matadors”, the “musketeers” or the “colonels” of Italian cinema. A group of which, in addition to Tognazzi, they are part Alberto Sordi, Nino Manfredi, Vittorio Gassman e Marcello Mastroianni. But the story of Tognazzi is not only in the cinema: it began in the theater, crossed the television in the year in which it debuted in Italy and also touched on other issues, such as that time in which Evil made someone believe that he was the leader of the Red Brigades.
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Tognazzi was born in Cremona on 23 March 1922 and, as the son of an insurance inspector, the first years of his life were rather itinerant. Already at the age of 14 he started working in a Negroni sausage factory and also found some time to make his first theatrical experiences, which he continued to do – when possible – even in the years of the Second World War.
In 1945 he worked for some time as an archivist but then moved to Milan, to try to make acting his job: for a while he was part of the theater company of Wanda Osiris, dedicating himself above all to variety theater and in 1950 he starred in his first film: The cadets of Gascon, inspired by a popular one song.
The television debut was in 1954, the year in which the broadcasts of the National Program, the only channel at the time, began. Together with Raimondo Vianello, Tognazzi was the protagonist of “Un due tre”, a comic variety made up of sketches and parodies. At that time it was very fashionable that, in a comic duo, one was the comedian protagonist and the other the shoulder. In “One two three” the two comedians could instead be considered on a par, albeit with two different comedy: that of Vianello, often defined as “English”, and that of Tognazzi, much less sober and much more caricatural. Interviewed by Corriere della Sera in the nineties, Vianello he told:
We came from the radio, we carried a certain student spirit with us. I felt “obliged” to buy TV because there was the World Cup. But Tognazzi didn’t buy it. And since we were parodying TV shows, he trusted my stories. Ugo was mimicking characters he had never seen.
In 1959 “Un due tre” was closed after a sketch in which Tognazzi and Vianello made a simple parody of a small incident that occurred to the President of the Republic Giovanni Gronchi, who – at an event where Charles De Gaulle was a guest – fell to the ground, apparently because he expected to find a chair behind him that wasn’t there. On TV, Tognazzi in turn simulated a fall, with Vianello saying to him “who do you think you are?”. In that interview with Courier service, Vianello said: “In the TV studio there were three minutes of applause: from the triumph we understood that we were ruined.”
In the fifties, meanwhile, Tognazzi had continued to act in the theater and also made his way into the cinema. But generally, in his biographies, the first role that really stands out is that of 1961 in Federal by Luciano Salce, a film in which he played the fascist Primo Arcovazzi intent on escorting an anti-fascist philosopher to Rome: driving a sidecar and on a rather bumpy road.
In the following years and decades, Tognazzi returned more than once to work with Salce – in roles which, as explained by Francesco Bolzoni for theEncyclopedia of Cinema, were always of “bourgeois tempted by companies greater than themselves” – and, among others, he collaborated very well with Dino Risi (among others for The march on Rome, And samples e In the name of the Italian people) and then also with Mario Monicelli (We want the Colonels, Popular Novel, My friends), Marco Ferreri (The monkey woman, The big binge, Don’t touch the white woman), Ettore Scola and also Pier Paolo Pasolini. In this regard, Ricky Tognazzi – one of his sons – he told that his father “wore it like a feather in his cap” that Pasolini had said he was “the most sensitive and intelligent person ever known”. The son also added that his father, “who came from the show and had a diploma as an accountant, was reciting Pirandello in French in Paris”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLuv73-Xwb8
The best known, among the many characters of Tognazzi, is probably that of Count Mascetti of My friends.
The best, among the totally dramatic ones, is according to many that of the protagonist of Tragedy of a ridiculous man by Bernardo Bertolucci, for which Tognazzi won the Best Actor award at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival.
But Tognazzi really did a lot, of everything. Such as he wrote Cristina Battocletti on Sole 24 Ore, «The directors exploited his provocative slope, also entrusting him with embarrassing parts – such as that of the protagonist The petomaniac (1983) by Pasquale Festa Campanile -, when not dirty, or stained. This is the case of the trilogy The vice, a parody of the homosexual world, which today would be rightly opposed and branded as intolerable ».
In an attempt to enclose many of his roles in a few words, Bolzoni spoke of a “large group of characters (prelates and shopkeepers, nobles and workers) who hide heaps of hypocrisy under an apparent sympathy” and of a “substantially unpleasant bourgeois , usually a professional who suddenly realizes that he cannot excel in a world that he thought was built in his image and likeness and that instead leaves him behind ».
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In his film career, Tognazzi starred in about 150 films and directed five: among the latter none was particularly exalted by critics or appreciated by the public, and the most successful is considered The whistle in the nose, taken from the story “Seven floors” by Dino Buzzati.
Outside the cinema, Tognazzi got noticed for some of his provocations. The most famous is that of 1979 in which, in the midst of the lead years, he agreed to collaborate with the satirical magazine Evil that sent to newsstands a series of fake front pages of real newspapers in which it was claimed that he was, perhaps in league with Vianello, the “great old man” at the head of the Red Brigades. His collaboration consisted in having himself photographed handcuffed next to fake carabinieri and in later claiming, in a joke revealed, the “right to bullshit”. A few years later, being interviewed by Pippo Baudo a Sunday In, Tognazzi was once again noted for a series of particularly provocative responses, not exactly suitable for television, especially in those years.
For the rest, Tognazzi – who died at 68 following a cerebral hemorrhage – tells of the many relationships (“chaotic manager of a life full of loves, adventures and children”, he defined the Courier service) the great passion for cooking and a sort of tennis tournament that for years he organized in his house, inviting actors and various friends and alternating games with big bites. The tournament prize was a golden colander.
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