Roberto Herlitzka, a giant of the theatre, has died at the age of 86.
He was born in Turin on 2 October 1937, son of Bruno, of Jewish origin, who emigrated to Italy from Brno in Czechoslovakia, married briefly to Micaela Berruti and then took refuge with his family in Argentina, thus managing to escape the Racial Laws of 1938 and remarry there with the painter Giorgina Lattes. Returning to Piedmont after the war, the young Roberto graduated from the Massimo D'Azeglio classical high school, enrolled in the faculty of literature, but soon joined his father in Rome and embraced an artistic career, graduating from the Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Aquiline nose, iron will, mastery of all the means of the great actor, he always refused to change his surname : «I know it's difficult to write - he loved to say - but it reminds me of where I come from and that K in the middle always sends me back to Kafka." He always spoke in a low voice but in the theater he could be heard clearly even in the back rows, the result of an interpretive education learned at the school of Orazio Costa who made him debut in "La vita è dream" by Calderon de la Barca and wanted him with him nine more times between the 1950s and 1960s. From that moment he dominated the scene until the new century, a scene marked by successes with the major directors: Luca Ronconi first and foremost, but also Antonio Calenda, Gabriele Lavia, Gianfranco De Bosio, Luigi Squarzina, Mario Missiroli and Lina Wermueller who "adopted him " at Cinema. The entire repertoire of the immortals, from the Greek tragedians to Shakespeare, from Ibsen to Miller, was familiar to him and he demonstrated it with an elegant and flexible transformation that made him credible in costume or in modern clothes, without differences. Five times the world of theater would have recognized his merits between the UBU Awards, the Gassman Award and the Flaiano Award.
At the cinema and on TV however, although almost always in supporting or character actor roles, he was a constant presence until two years ago when Paolo Taviani called him for his latest film, "Leonora addio". He appeared on Rai at the time of dramas as early as 1960 with "Cinderella" by Stefano De Stefani, but became popular a decade later with "Un certain Harry Brent" by Leonardo Cortese, in the role of the ambiguous Milton alongside Alberto Lupo. Among the major successes of his career: "La Certosa di Parma" directed by Mauro Bolognini, "La Piovra 7", "Qualunque cosa succeda" by Alberto Negrin, the recent "In nome della rosa" by Giacomo Battiato and even some episodes of " Boris" in 2007. Lina Wertmueller took him to the cinema in 1973 ("Film of love and anarchy") and this ideal partnership led him to work several times with the Oscar-winning director and with an unforgettable generation of authors for more than 60 films. From Emidio Greco ("The Invention of Morel" of which the Giornate degli Autori celebrates the 50th anniversary this year) to "Pasqualino Settebellezze" together with Giancarlo Giannini, from "Oci Ciornie" with Marcello Mastroianni to "Gli occhi d' gold" with Philippe Noiret, from "Tracce di vita amorosa" by Peter Del Monte to "In nome del Popolo Sovereign" by Luigi Magni, Herlitzka was immediately able to carve out a prominent place for himself throughout the 1980s.
But it was the meeting with Marco Bellocchio ("The Dream of the Butterfly", 1994) that projected him into a dimension of "other" protagonist culminating in the painful and intense incarnation in Aldo Moro at the time of "Buongiorno notte" in 2003. With Bellocchio he shared the set in almost all of the director's latest works, as in "Sleeping Beauty", "Blood of My Blood" (a memorable vampire with very human accents), "You Have Beautiful Dreams". Meanwhile, Herlitzka entered the collective imagination thanks to Paolo Sorrentino (the cardinal in "The Great Beauty" and Crepuscolo in "Loro"), discovered a new youth with Roberto Andò ("The Hidden Child" together with Silvio Orlando), began to availability of young talents such as the debut director Luigi Lo Cascio, Giorgio Pasotti, the De Serio brothers, Elisabetta Sgarbi. In his bookcase there was a memory of it with the statuettes of David, the Silver Ribbons, the Pasinetti at the Venice Film Festival, the Gassman Prize at Felice Laudadio's Bif&st in Bari.
(Unioneonline/D)