Manly, chiseled, exceedingly handsome, very agile Massimo Girotti was
an engineering student and polo/swimming star before entering films in
1939. He began auspiciously in serious leads, most notably
Roberto Rossellini's
Desiderio (1946),
Luchino Visconti's
Ossessione - Von Liebe besessen (1943) and
Vittorio De Sica's
La porta del cielo (1945),
while his physical stature and all-round athletism were put to good use
in actioneers such as Spartacus, der Rebell von Rom (1953) in
which he played the pre-Kirk Douglas slave-turned-leader role of
Spartacus. By the 60s, however, Girotti was reduced to support roles in
swashbuckling adventure and badly-dubbed sand-and-spear spectacles,
appearing only occasionally in well-mounted films of quality, such as
Pier Paolo Pasolini's
Teorema: Geometrie der Liebe (1968),
Bernardo Bertolucci's
Der letzte Tango in Paris (1972)
and Visconti's
Die Unschuld (1976). He died only
a few weeks before the release of his last film,
Ferzan Özpetek's
Das Fenster gegenüber (2003).
