The one-time assistant director to Federico Fellini went on to have a distinguished directorial career in the 1970sPeter Bradshaw on Lina Wertmüller: a thrilling live-wire film-makerLina Wertmüller, the Italian film-maker who was the first woman to be nominated for the best director Oscar, has died aged 93 in Rome. Wertmüller, whose scabrous political fables made a major impact on international cinema in the early 70s, was Oscar-nominated for her 1975 film Seven Beauties, and was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2019.
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Born in 1928 in Rome, Wertmüller – whose full name was Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spanol von Braueich, due to her part-Swiss descent – became interested in theatre and performance in her 20s, touring Europe with a puppet company, before getting to know film director Federico Fellini (via a schoolfriend who was married to
Actor Marcello Mastroianni). She worked as an assistant director on Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece 8 1/2 (“I was the worst assistant, but that was overlooked because I was likable,” she later told the Guardian), and made her own film debut in the same year with The Basilisks, a slow-paced portrait of life in a southern Italian town, and which benefited from a score by Ennio Morricone.