RIP Giancarlo Zagni

Farewell to Giancarlo Zagni, worked with Visconti.

He died in Rome and was a director from Bologna. He was 86 years old. He married Alida Valli in Mexico. He was assistant to the great Luchino and directed Lollobrigida in “La bellezza di Ippolita”.

Zagni was born in Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy on November 4, 1926 and had started in the 1950s in the theater as an assistant to director Luchino Visconti in many works (from Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, “La locandiera” by Carlo Goldoni, “Tre sorelle” by Anton Chekhov, “Medea di Euripide”, “Il Seduttore di Fabbri”). Always with Visconti, had went on to the cinema as an assistant director for film direction. On the set of that masterpiece he met the magnificent Alida Valli and they married in Mexico. During the filming of Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Scream" he met screenwriter and writer Elio Bartolini, author of the novel “La bellezza di Ippolita” who, four years after he wrote Zagni to make his first feature film.

Meanwhile he broke with the master Visconti, who never forgave him. 1955 in his first trip to America, he attended the Actor's Studio in New York, run by Lee Strasberg and then went to Mexico to the Royal Theater, becoming the founder and professor of the School of Cinema National Autonomous University of Mexico.

In Italy he adapted from the novel by Elio Bartolini and directed the film “La bellezza di Ippolita” with Gina Lollobrigida and Enrico Maria Salerno, a film that represented Italy at the Berlin Film Festival. In 1966 he won the plate 'Lion of St. Mark' at the Exhibition of the Venice Film Festival with the film "Testadirapa" with Folco Lulli and Gigliola Cinquetti. Then he retired from filmmaking but not from the film: in the following years Zagni started a new career as a producer and distributor himself as an officer dell'Italnoleggio. He also devoted himself to theater in the square and with organizations such as UNICEF, then in 1980 which organizes and produces Ten to Survive, a television movie with cartoons on the bill of rights of children.

Giancarlo Zagni co-wrote the screenplay for one Euro-western “Execution” 1968.