Vittorio De Sica

Born in Sora, Lazio on July 7, 1901, Vittorio De Sica rose to fame in the 1920s and 1930s as a suave, charming leading man of Italian stage and light romantic film comedies. However, witnessing the devastating poverty, moral destruction, and human despair of post-World War II Italy ignited a radical artistic transformation. Forming an immortal partnership with Marxist screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, De Sica pioneered Italian Neorealism: taking cameras out of artificial studio sets and onto war-ravaged streets, casting non-professional working-class actors, and confronting the harsh realities of unemployment and child labor. In 1946, he directed "Shoeshine" (Sciuscià), exploring the tragic exploitation of street children in occupied Rome; the film was so extraordinary that the Academy created an honorary award that served as the precursor to the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. In 1948, De Sica directed his immortal masterpiece "Bicycle Thieves" (Ladri di biciclette), casting a real-life factory worker (Lamberto Maggiorani) as an impoverished father desperately scouring Rome with his young son for the stolen bicycle required for his bill-posting job. Regularly voted among the greatest motion pictures ever made, it won De Sica a second Academy Award. He completed his neorealist quartet with "Miracle in Milan" (1951) and "Umberto D." (1952), a devastating study of elderly poverty. De Sica won two additional Academy Awards for "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" (1963, starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni) and "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" (1971). Passing away on November 13, 1974, Vittorio De Sica remains world cinema's supreme poet of human empathy.