Film industry vet Tullio Kezich dies

Cinephile was a critic, Fellini biographer

By NICK VIVARELLI

Tullio Kezich, a prominent figure in European cinephile circles who was Italy's leading film critic and Federico Fellini's most authoritative biographer as well as a scribe, producer and occasional actor, died in Rome on Monday. He was 80 and had been suffering from an undisclosed form of cancer for the past few months.

Born in Trieste, Kezich started his career in 1948 as a critic at Radio Trieste and subsequently made his way to Milan and then to Rome, where, while working for several Italian film publications, he became a close friend of Fellini's in the 1960s during the "La Dolce Vita" days.

But Kezich also cultivated a close rapport with many other prominent Italian directors, several of whom, including Ermanno Olmi, Lina Wertmuller and Roberto Rossellini, he collaborated with in various ways. Kezich helped Olmi find financing for his first feature, the 1961 corporate-alienation drama "Il Posto," which Kezich collaborated in penning. He was also cast by Olmi in the pic as a creepy psychologist who screens job applicants at a mammoth company. Subsequently, Kezich wrote the script for Olmi's English-language "The Legend of the Holy Drinker." The adaptation of Austrian author Joseph Roth's novella, toplining Rutger Hauer as an alcoholic struggling to regain respect, won the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion in 1988.

As a critic, Kezich worked for a slew of topnotch Italo media outlets, including film mags Sipario and "Cinema Nuovo as well as prominent newsweekly "Panorama," and daily La Repubblica prior to his long-standing stint with Corriere starting in 1989.

He was also a member of the Berlin Film Festival jury in 1984.

In 2006, Kezich's influential tome "Fedrico Fellini: His Life and Work" was published in the U.S. by Faber and Faber.

That same year he was profiled by Variety among the world's 10 most influential critics of the older generation.

Kezich, who was honorary president of the Federico Fellini foundation, was instrumental to mounting the exhibition "Fellini's Book of Dreams," which was on display this year during the Oscars at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences' Beverly Hills headquarters.

Kezich, who had been accredited at the Venice Film Festival for 62 years, from 1946 to 2008, was paid tribute to by the Lido, which announced it would rename in his honor its new nod for a young Italian cinema critic.

"This will be a way to keep him with us during our future editions," said Venice Biennale president Paolo Baratta.

Kezich is survived by a son, Giovanni, and by his second wife, Alessandra Levantesi, who is film critic for daily La Stampa.