Umberto Orsini

Umberto Orsini
This is how I act—and how I am (if you like)
by Rodolfo Di Giammarco – Il Venerdì

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At 91, Umberto Orsini returns to the stage with Prima del Temporale, a memoir-performance premiering at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto. A solitary actor, the leader of his own company for fifteen seasons and a protagonist of more than sixty years of theatre, Orsini retraces his personal memories and reflects on a profession he describes as “an anomaly.”

Born in Novara and raised more among rice fields than salons, Orsini has traversed extraordinary chapters: from his debut in The Diary of Anne Frank with the Compagnia dei Giovani, through the long history at Rome’s Teatro Eliseo, to collaborations with directors such as Visconti and Ronconi. In his studio, among posters and playbills that evoke past lives and productions, he recalls childhood, encounters, missed opportunities—like the role in Il sorpasso—and the dearest friendships, from Corrado Pani to Rossella Falk.

Prima del Temporale, conceived together with Massimo Popolizio, weaves fragments of autobiography, anecdotes and vanished affections into a theatrical confession Orsini hopes will feel as intimate as a dinner among friends. With his calm voice, he asserts the right to be moved, to feel like a survivor, and, even at ninety, to keep seeking in theatre a place of truth.

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In 2019, you published your autobiography Sold Out. Now Prima del Temporale feels like a biopic partly drawn from those pages...
“Given my age, and the fact that it’s a self-portrait I wrote myself, it might seem narcissistic to present a live memoir. But the title reflects a project that had long been in the air: staging Strindberg’s Storm in a production directed by Popolizio with nine actors—another idea cancelled by the pandemic. Massimo then encouraged me to recount my life, including some dialogues exchanged with two figures from my daily profession, drawing partly on Sold Out, but also reflecting freely, since 70 percent of my life isn’t in that book. Another question is: to whom should one tell their story? That’s why I chose a seamstress and a theatre hand, the two characters who appear onstage with me.”

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You will have a chance to revisit your youth in Novara. Your brother, an advertising man, helped create the Bialetti mascot, and you had striking relationships with women from the world of entertainment. What kind of balance sheet will you reconstruct?
“I didn’t have a strong inclination to become an actor, yet here I am performing. People have attributed a certain allure to me, but now my neck is wrinkled. I may have seemed a prototype, but I think of myself as an anomaly. If, by some miracle, the people I loved and who have gone were all here with me now, I would feel like a survivor out of Wild Strawberries, because they all died younger: Visconti at 70, Valli at 66, Patroni Griffi at 80, Falk at 84, Pani at 70. I never felt like an Italian Sordi who reflected entire eras. I have a solitary nature—almost as though I’m more connected to the rice fields of Piedmont where I was born.”

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Is there an anecdote that reveals a destiny that never came to pass?
“I believe there is. When I went to Castiglioncello to present Sold Out, someone gave me a belated gift by showing me a production plan for Risi’s Il sorpasso. Next to Gassman’s name, instead of Trintignant, was mine—which, I was told, was later replaced for co-production reasons. Later, I was gratified by Visconti’s invitation to appear in The Damned.”

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And what gesture, instead, most helped your career?
“Producer Buffardi, Totò’s son-in-law, had seen my film with Mina and realised I was quite popular with young women. He offered to back another movie, on condition I found a director. In Rome, I was spending time with Caprioli, Valeri, Flaiano and Patroni Griffi, and I asked Patroni to try directing for the first time, with Il mare, suggesting part of the story myself...”

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What did you suggest?
“A story set in Capri. My character is waiting there for Rossella Falk, who writes that she won’t be coming after all. They see me crying in the Piazzetta near the public phone. A beautiful woman passes by—Françoise Prévost, who resembles Rossella—and I have an affair with her, competing with Dino Mele. A reverse Jules and Jim. It was a total failure in Italy. Le Monde called it the best film at the Venice Festival. In France, it did well, and it played for a year in London at a cinema on Oxford Circus. For me, it was the chance to meet many British artists.”

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You’ve always had a special connection to the English language...
“I’ve always had references across the Channel. My model is the speed and dryness of speech with no inflections, a modern structure, which Enrico Maria Salerno introduced me to when we performed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? directed by Zeffirelli. In Britain I built friendships with Ian McKellen, Ralph Fiennes, Judi Dench, Tom Courtenay. I was in the audience for the premiere of the classic Look Back in Anger.”

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In Il mare you showed genuine emotion. Have you often cried at work?
“I recall three times, during rehearsals or on set: when Giorgio De Lullo staged Inge’s Dark at the Top of the Stairs; when Luca Ronconi prepared Botho Strauss’s Visitors; and when Luchino Visconti was filming Ludwig.”

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Do you think an artist has the right to show humanity, or do you see it as a loss of control?
“For me, expressing a form of humanity comes from the body itself as it changes and grows older. So it’s a physiological matter, and I’d say technique has nothing to do with it.”

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It’s known that your comfort zone of warmth and sharing often emerges at dinners after performances. With Prima del Temporale, wouldn’t you like to create that same feeling of exchange on stage?
“I’d love to be unfiltered, as if we were all sitting around a table, recalling old stories. For example, the Marinella bathhouse in Ostia, full of gossips, where Arbasino would take me in his open MG. On the way home, I nearly died in the shower from gas boiler fumes, and a flatmate saved me. Or recreating the joyful sounds of Il Musichiere. Or making fun of myself—here I am at ninety, doing The Man with the Flower in His Mouth again, just as I did at twenty-one to get into the Academy. And then I pause to remember certain affections...”

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Which ones?
“My bond with Corrado Pani, for instance. I miss Corradino so much—his phone calls, how we laughed, how he teased me, his volleys at the net, how he beat me at poker. And when I was performing in Pippo Delbono’s The Cry and an actress confided in me, then later took her own life. The talks I had with Vittorio Gassman when we agreed that actors like Salvo Randone and Gianni Santuccio deserved help. Santuccio, who once left a seat in the audience for a prostitute who had flattered him, came to see me in Amadeus many times to hear Mozart’s Requiem, and asked that it be played at his funeral—and so it was. And after I danced under the six-metre-long legs of my Ellen Kessler, the ones from the Omsa che gambe! advert, I end Prima del Temporale with tender words for the last Rossella Falk. I drove her blue Chevrolet when, for my own small revenge, I returned to Novara with my tennis racket to play at the club where, as a schoolboy, I was never allowed in. As for Rossella, in her final days I pretended I still had my Piedmontese accent, the way she used to correct me in our first years together. Then the curtain falls. And at that point, I’m ready to stage that famous Strindberg Storm. Which, of course, will never be seen.”

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