Giorgio Albertazzi obituary

Of the 40 or so film appearances by Giorgio Albertazzi, the Italian actor-manager, who has died aged 92, the best known was his unsettling role as X in Alain Resnais’s L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961). In the surreal film, set in a dreamlike hotel, Albertazzi plays a man who claims to have had a relationship with a woman, A, and who has come to take her away from her husband, M (Sacha Pitoëff), 12 months later, as she asked him to. But A (Delphine Seyrig) appears to have no recollection of this.

The film won the Golden Lion at Venice that year, after which Albertazzi also appeared in two Joseph Losey films: Eva (1962) and The Assassination of Trotsky (1972). His first hit on TV had been in 1959 in The Idiot and he was also memorable in the miniseries Dante (1965) and Jekyll (1969).

Born in a small town near Fiesole in the hills above Florence, the son of a railway worker, Albertazzi grew up on the I Tatti estate of the art historian Bernard Berenson, for whom his grandfather was handyman. After some amateur drama, the young Albertazzi made his professional debut in a small role in Luchino Visconti’s 1949 production of Troilus and Cressida, a Who’s Who of the great names of Italian theatre. The play was staged in the summer of 1949 in the Boboli gardens of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, and it was there that Albertazzi first met Franco Zeffirelli, who designed the production.

He went on to appear in much of Zeffirelli’s highly acclaimed work, notably a Hamlet in which Albertazzi took the title role. This Hamlet toured festivals all over Europe and to London, when the National Theatre director Laurence Olivier invited Zeffirelli to bring it to the company’s 1964 quatercentenary Shakespeare season at the Old Vic.

Albertazzi had already played Hamlet two years before in a traditional, open-air production at Verona staged by the British director Frank Hauser. But he felt more at home with Zeffirelli’s more revolutionary production, which had a contemporary, almost avant-garde, feel: the ghost of Claudius, for example, did not appear on stage in clanking armour, but was an electronic vision. Many British critics wrote that at last they had seen a “non-operatic” Italian actor. Bamber Gascoigne in the Observer described Albertazzi as “like a more successful [Peter] O’Toole; less violent in the public scenes, more genuinely thoughtful in the private ones”.

In 1965 Zeffirelli directed Albertazzi in Arthur Miller’s autobiographical After the Fall, which had been performed for the first time the year before. The playwright went to Naples for the first night.

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Albertazzi had successes on stage with many companies, and in 1956 he formed his own, with his partner on stage and off for many years, Anna Proclemer. Among the classics that were applauded was Antony and Cleopatra (1979). Another memorable Roman role was as the Emperor Hadrian in Maurizio Scaparro’s visually striking 1989 production of an adaptation of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, in the ruins of Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli near Rome, a performance that Albertazzi continued to revive in one of the many one-man shows he performed in subsequent years.

He directed one feature film in which he appeared, Gradiva (1980) but it did not go on general release. In recent years he was joined on stage and TV by the satirical writer Dario Fo, who described him as “a fellow anarchist” even if one with opposite political tendencies. Indeed, Albertazzi was for many years considered a rightwinger, probably because he had enrolled in the army of Mussolini’s puppet republic of Salò, fighting in 1944 against the partisans and allied armies who were liberating Italy from what was left of the fascist regime. Later Albertazzi was put on trial, accused but absolved of murders committed in those times. After the comedian Beppe Grillo launched his pseudo-anarchist “five star movement”, the Movimento 5 Stelle, in 2009, both Fo and Albertazzi gave it their support.

After a long relationship with Proclemer and relationships with many other women, in 2007 Albertazzi married his companion of several years, Pia de’ Tolomei. She survives him.