Bene, Carmelo

(1937-2002)

   Actor, writer, theater and film director. The unrivaled enfant terrible of Italian postwar theater, Bene studied briefly at the National Academy for Dramatic Art in Rome before abandoning it to form his own theater company. Beginning with an adaptation of Albert Camus's Caligula (1959), he became the foremost representative of an uncompromisingly iconoclastic and experimental form of theater, cultivating an extravagant baroque tendency both on and off the stage. He made his first appearance in film playing the character of a priest in Franco Indovina's Lo scatenato (Catch as Catch Can, 1967), followed by the role of Creon in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, 1967). A year later, after making the short Hermitage (1968), he directed himself in an adaptation of his own novel, La signora dei turchi (Our Lady of the Turks, 1968), which was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival but in the event was awarded the Special Jury Prize. This was followed by Capricci (1969), Don Giovanni (1971), which interwove Shakespearean sonnets with a short story by Barbey d'Aurevilly, and a version of Oscar Wilde's Salome (1972). A year later, Un Amleto di meno (One Hamlet Less, 1973) brilliantly combined elements of Shakespeare's play with the poetry of Jules Laforgue, earning the work a nomination for the Palme d'or at Cannes.

   After this frenetic series of visually baroque "antifilms," Bene abandoned the cinema in order to devote himself to theater, writing, and music. He returned to the small screen in the late 1990s with Macbeth horror suite di Carmelo Bene da William Shakespeare (Macbeth Horror Suite, 1996), and an iconoclastic version of the children's classic Pinocchio ovvero lo spettacolo della providenza (Pinocchio, 1999).

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira