Vittorio De Sica

Vittorio De Sica cast a factory worker as a factory worker, shot in the streets, and made the film that sent a generation of directors into the cinema. He was a matinee idol first - a light comic actor of real charm in Italian films of the 1930s - and went on acting all his life, largely to pay for the films he wanted to direct and for gambling debts that were substantial. With the writer Cesare Zavattini he made Shoeshine in 1946 and then Bicycle Thieves in 1948: a man whose bicycle is stolen searches Rome with his small son and finally tries to steal one himself, played by a steelworker and a boy found in the street, with no studio and no plot machinery. It won an honorary Academy Award, and Satyajit Ray saw it in London and decided within days to become a director. Umberto D, about an old man and his dog and a pension that will not stretch, was attacked by an Italian government minister for washing dirty linen abroad. He later made commercial films and comedies with Loren and Mastroianni, and won two more Oscars for The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Bicycle Thieves was voted the greatest film ever made in the first Sight and Sound poll in 1952. Zavattini wrote most of his important films and the partnership is inseparable from the results. The 1949 Italian law known as the Andreotti law allowed the government to withhold export licences from films that showed the country badly, which was aimed squarely at work like his. He acted in over a hundred and fifty films, including General della Rovere for Rossellini, and was nominated for an acting Oscar himself. He gambled heavily all his life and said openly that he acted to cover the losses.

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