Goodbye to the magical smile of Gigi Proietti. Mattarella: “Teacher and lucid intellectual”

He reached the age of eighty with a rich career, as a true actor, a master of technique, a character of great irony and charisma, loved by both the more advanced public and the large audience of viewers. Gigi Proietti died at an altitude of 80, from a heart attack that was not the first. Born in Rome on November 2, 1940, a passionate musician and singer since his youth, he approaches experimental theater during university. In some 50 years of activity, he has thus collected 33 fiction films, 42 films, 51 theatrical performances of which 37 as a director, in addition to having recorded 10 albums as a soloist and directed 8 operas.

A theatrical career, from In My Eyes Please, through Shakespeare, which he had summarized in a show Battle Horses chosen to celebrate its 50 years on stage in 2016, crowned by the fifteen-year direction of the Elizabethan Globe Theater in Rome. Although long before his school, and his vocation as a teacher, he had expressed himself in Brancaccio, of which he was director since 1978, together with Sandro Merli, to give life to a forge of talents among which were Flavio Insinna, Chiara Noschese , Giorgio. Tirabassi, Enrico Brignano, Massimo Wertmüller, Paola Tiziana Cruciani, Rodolfo Laganà, Francesca Reggiani, Gabriele Cirilli and Sveva Altieri. As much loved by television audiences as Proietti, first as a director (his was a Fantastico 4 in 1983) and later as the protagonist of a blockbuster fiction like Il Maresciallo Rocca, which also gained more than 16 million viewers.

MATTARELLA REMEMBER THIS. “It was with great pain that I learned the news of the disappearance, on her eightieth birthday, of Gigi Proietti. Multifaceted and multifaceted actor, director, organizer, voice actor, teacher of generations of actors, natural heir to Ettore Petrolini, he was the genuine expression of the Roman spirit ”, says the President of the Republic. “To the great culture, the exceptional expressive capacity, fruit of an intense work on himself, combined an overwhelming sympathy and a natural goodness, which had made him a favorite of the public of all ages. I would also like to remember him as a lucid and passionate intellectual, always attentive and sensitive to the needs of the weakest groups and to the renewal of society ”.

THE TRIBUTE ON THE MOVE OF STUDENTS AND COLLEAGUES – A gigantic actor, a monstrous talent, a beloved man. The pain in the entertainment world is great. “A great teacher” is the memory, among the first, of another symbol of the Roman world, Carlo Verdone. “Many actors owe him a lot, it would not hurt to name the Teatro Brancaccio in Rome after him. Verdone launched a proposal that was immediately accepted by many, to dedicate a historic theater in the capital to Proietti, of which he was artistic director for a long time. “He was a truly generous and humble person, he didn’t get on the pedestal. Today a gigantic actor leaves us ”. Enrico Montesano remembers him with a joke that is inspired by the cult film ‘Horse fever’, where he joined him: “Te possino Mandra ‘, today?”.

The memory of Renzo Arbore is moved: “Gigi Proietti is one of the pillars on which the Italian show was based, the entire Italian show”. “You leave me with Sagitta, Carlotta, Susanna (the actor’s wife and daughters, ed), your friends and your unlimited audience, an orphan of your love, your affection, your overflowing ability”, Loretta Goggi is excited. Many actors, but also singers (Proietti had an extraordinary voice and was among the greatest interpreters of Roman song) who pay homage to him. From Rocco Papaleo, who defines him as a “master of art, master of life and thought”, to Edoardo Leo, who underlines: “Even today we can only applaud him. Clap your hands until your hands hurt. ” Anna Foglietta dedicates a thought to him in Roman dialect, writing among other things “I am devastated .. the scene of tears for me and the nun ceases .. you are so old, in this year you damn well Lord .. you made us lighter core and this dear Giggi is priceless. You are destined for immortality. ”Pierfrancesco Favino decides to greet him with an emotional sonnet in Roman dialect, reminiscent of the one Proietti himself dedicated to Alberto Sordi on the occasion of the funeral.

THE THOUSAND FACES OF GIGI PROIETTI. The eternal mandrake, the unfortunate gambler and boastful of Steno’s Fever. Gastone, the penniless actor, incurable narcissist, invented by Petrolini. The reassuring Marshal Rocca from one of the most beloved television series ever. And then again Toto, the ancient Roman dealing with saùna, the businessman and contractor Pietro Ammicca, Armando Duval of the Lady of the Camellias reinterprets in a comic key, the poet Narcisio Vanesio: in 50 years of career the ‘Battle horses’ by Gigi Proietti, celebrated in the title of one of his lengthy theatrical shows also transposed to television, have become proverbial creatures, quoted by heart for generations.

‘Long live the theater where everything is false, but nothing is false, and this is true: it is in this statement that Gigi Proietti loved more than repeating, reiterating, the nature and strength of his being an actor, actor and essentially theatrical, more Beyond the television hits, which he had accidentally discovered on stage when he was young and in which he had noticed and spent his life. And in the game of his characters, his inventions, his reinterpretations he always managed to involve precisely because, while he woke up laughter, he was still able to feel and feel real as in reality it is never possible.

IT WAS SIMPLY ROME – A projected photo of Gigi Proietti
at the Colosseum and the Capitol. This is the tribute from Rome, announced by Mayor Virginia Raggi. The funeral will be held on Thursday in Piazza del Popolo.

A city that is the whole world. Gigi Proietti, son of the capital and the theater, had that sense of Romanity that mixes and regenerates, unites and summarizes, keeping together the noblest verse and the withering joke. His Rome was popular but already noble as its origins, nomads between the most Renaissance street in the city and the neighborhoods farthest from the center. “I was born on a side street in via Giulia, a beautiful street, once it was the papal course, but after 10 months I had already moved home: we moved behind Villa Celimontana, in via dei Santissimi Quattro. Then I ended up on the outskirts, in the Tufello, in a council house ”, is written in a mini guide to Rome and its favorite places. Then the Liceo Augusto in via Appia, after primary and secondary school in the Vittorino da Feltre, and the nightlife capital of clubs where, at the end of adolescence, he was already testing the histrionic path and the urgency of the show even though he was enrolled in Right in the Sapienza. Of those nightclubs where he sang, he also sadly recalled “there isn’t one left, they’ve all gone” but the voice trained in those smoke-filled clubs was already a reliable iron of the trade that will make him even a happy and sentimental chansonnier if he is necessary. Because being an actor is everything, a bit like being a Roman.
And among the places of youthful repentance, from the time when he lived what would have been like Grande, Proietti gives us not only the afternoons with the “lumps” and the family in the trattoria of Appio Latino but also the Tiber, God does not want. But that river is not what it is now, the river of that time coexisted with Rome but now it seems like a wound that is fighting. “Now, however, some barges survive in the Tiber: I remember how crowded they were, the Romans liked them very much, they went, sunbathed and bathed. Nowadays there are some who try to revitalize that tradition, restaurants and even very beautiful nightclubs, but you can no longer dive, who would ever swim in what was the “blond river”? he asks, later recalling the island of the Romans, which is Ponza where he had his home and there he went diving and bathing, pushing his rubber boat to Palmarola “for something even more beautiful.” But then, as he is an actor, the personal topography begins to blend in with the artistic one, both sentimental maps nevertheless and always, always, with the polycentric city and never limited within the walls.

And so it is from the suburbs where Proietti was born, from the Tenda Theater in Piazza Mancini in 76, hence A me los ojos where half of Rome pours, but also Eduardo, Fellini and the then mayor Argán. It is the true popular theater, but also cult, from Shakespeare to Petrolini. Because, as an artist and craftsman, Proietti also mixes the Roman dialect with the verses, in fact he makes poetry of it and in his mother tongue that pays homage to another immense Roman, Alberto Sordi who was no longer. And in the timeline, the Tenda Theater, after Brancaccio and Brancaccino, leads directly to the Globe, made after the electrocution of his London brother, which flourishes in Villa Borgese (where as a child he went to the Cinema dei Piccoli) and wanted in the plan of the temple. Shakespeareans: tramps, all in wood, pop prices and those who are not in the boxes “must bring cushions.” A vision, in fact “a mandrakata”, as he himself put it (another iconic place is the Tor di Valle racecourse in horse fever), which always runs out and has young actors and actresses. But Proietti still wanted to give, his projects were not finished at the Globe. In an interview with Gloria Satta al Messaggero, she confesses her inexhaustible urgency to always say and do based on universal Romanism: the staging of Tosca and the theatrical reduction of Casotto, the Sergio Citti film. And it doesn’t stop there.
He was also thinking, as always, of the young Romans. “I want to start Radio Raccordo Anulare, a project that I have had in mind for years. A station run by young people to keep all areas of the city connected and informed, especially the suburbs: the problem, in a metropolis like ours, is communication. The Romans must know each other, not remain distant as islands, “he said in the same interview. And again due to the strange birthday in the capital’s confinement, on April 21, 2020 in the middle of the compound by covid, he returned to the city stigmatizing those who described Rome as empty and closed as “ghostly”. “Rome is tired and has the right to rest,” he sculpted lapidary with that vivid but granite voice, which is already a monument to the Imperial Forums. The voice of one of Rome, son of the world.