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Massimo Girotti was an Italian film actor whose career spanned seven decades.
Born in Mogliano, in the province of Macerata, Girotti developed his athletic physique by swimming and polo. While studying engineering, he attracted the attention of Mario Soldati, who offered him a small part in the film Dora Nelson, but it was not until later, in Alessandro Blasetti's La corona di ferro and Roberto Rossellini's Un pilota ritorna, that he began to make an impression as a serious actor. In 1943 came a turning point in his career when Luchino Visconti cast him opposite the torrid Clara Calamai in Ossessione, an earlier adaptation of the same novel on which Hollywood's The Postman Always Rings Twice is based. The film marked, in a sense, the birth of Italian neo-realism. Some of his notable post-war films include Caccia tragica by Giuseppe De Santis and In nome della legge by Pietro Germi.
In 1950, he starred opposite Lucia Bosé in Michelangelo Antonioni's first full length feature, Cronaca di un amore. In 1953, he played Spartacus in an Italian epic film known in the US as Sins of Rome and then, returned to work again for Visconti, in Senso, giving perhaps the finest performance of his career. In the years which followed, he appeared in a large number of mainly Italian films for directors such as Lizzani, Bolognini, Vittorio Cottafavi, Lattuada, but it was not until 1968 that he once again played a role worthy of his talents - that of the father in Pasolini's Teorema with Terence Stamp and Silvana Mangano. Two years later, Pasolini cast him as Creonte opposite Maria Callas in his Medea. In 1972, he was in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris.
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