Ettore Petrolini

Born in Rome on 13 January 1884,[n 1] Petrolini was the fourth of six children[1] of a blacksmith from Ronciglione and grandson of a carpenter.[3] He had a difficult relationship with father, who was a strict moralist, but was close to his mother, who supported him both emotionally and financially when he decided to embrace a performing career.[1] He attended theaters in Rome as a boy, improvising for fun. His first performances were in the sideshows on Piazza Guglielmo Pepe.[4] At the age of 13, Petrolini attended reform school as he bitterly recalls in his memoirs. When 15, he decided to leave home to pursue a career in the theater. In 1900, he participated in a show at the "Pietro Cossa Theater" on the Trastevere.[5] Later, he performed in small, provincial theaters and in some cafés chantants with the stage name Ettore Loris.

In 1903, Petrolini began performing in Rome at variety theaters and café-chantants, where he provided parodies of renowned nineteenth-century actors, silent movie and opera divas, rhetorical addresses, and even of the variety theater itself.[6] In the same year, when aged 19, he met Ines Colapietro, who became both his professional and personal companion for many years, as well as the mother of his two children.[7] Ines, who was at the time only 15 years old, was hired as a singer by the Gambrinus theater in Rome, along with her sister Tina.[7] Ettore and Ines formed the comic duo Loris-Petrolini, performing together until the summer of 1911.[8] In May 1907 in Genoa, Ettore and Ines were invited by the impresario Charles Séguin to tour South America.[9] They performed in theaters and cafes in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, enjoying great success everywhere and becoming a household name in the capitals.[9][10] While Petrolini was in Rio de Janeiro, appendicitis forced him to leave the stage for a month. After an emergency operation and a period of convalescence, his comeback was triumphant, with many theatrical artists giving up their pay in his favor. In a single evening, Petrolini once earned four thousand lire.[9] After Rio, Petrolini remained a few months longer in South America. He returned for other tours in 1909 and 1911-1912, also appearing in Mexico and Cuba.[10]

Back from a successful tour in South America, Petrolini was hired in 1910 by Giuseppe Jovinelli for his theater in Piazza Guglielmo Pepe that had opened in 1909 with a performance by Raffaele Viviani. It was a great success and, after two seasons at the Teatro Jovinelli, the "Sala Umberto" company signed an exclusive three-year contract with him. In 1915, he formed his stage company, the Compagnia dei grandi spettacoli di varietà Petrolini, with whom he staged the revue Zero minus zero, that led to the debut of one of Petrolini's most famous characters, Fortunello, which was based upon a cartoon character.[6] The performance aroused the enthusiasm of Futurists such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who called Fortunello "the most difficult to analyze of all Petrolini's masterpieces." Petrolini was so flattered by the admiration of the Futurists that he participated in some of their public events performing texts of Marinetti, Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli. The collaboration culminated in Radioscopia di un duetto ("Radioscopy of a duet"), a one-act play co-written with the Futurist writer and painter Francesco Cangiullo in 1918. The following year, Mario Bonnard directed a film based on the play, Mentre il pubblico ride ("While the audience laughs"), starring Petrolini (in his film debut) and Niny Dinelli. Petrolini developed an anti-Dannunzian position, something which was appreciated by the Futurists, and thus he put on exhibit during his variety sketches.[6]

Petrolini starring in the film Il Medico per forza (1931)

From the 1920s, Petrolini's repertoire was enriched with a series of plays by Italian authors such as Alfredo Testoni, Renato Simoni, Roberto Bracco, Luigi Antonelli, Ugo Ojetti, Salvatore Gotta, Fausto Maria Martini, adapted by Petrolini himself. In 1925, he took his stage adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's Lumie di Sicilia, called Agro de limone.[11] In the 1920s, he also met Elma Criner, who became his companion and later his wife. In 1930, with the advent of sound films, Petrolini returned to the cinema as a protagonist of Nerone by Alessandro Blasetti, and also featuring Criner in the part of Poppea. The film featured some of Petrolini's most famous interpretations: Gastone, Nerone, Pulcinella. The same year he starred in Cortile by Carlo Campogalliani, based on the play of the same name by Fausto Maria Martini. Cortile was released the following year in a double bill with Il Medico per forza, Campogalliania and Petronelli's spoof version of Molière's farce Le Médecin malgré lui.[12] In Scenario's July 1934 issue, Petrolini has 94 close-ups, in a variety of poses, expressions, and emotional interpretations.[13]

In addition to films, he continued to make many short versions of stage plays. Petrolini's work as a playwright became richer and more complex over the years: from the first macchiette (i.e. comic musical monologues caricaturing stock characters), to the successful one-act plays Amori de notte and Romani de Roma to the late comedies such as Gastone, Il padiglione delle meraviglie, Benedetto fra le donne ("Blessed among women"), and Chicchignola. In these last two works, Petrolinian drama reached its peak, as irreverence gave way to more mature depictions, both bitter and compassionate, of human weakness. Now famous, Petrolini left Italy for a series of tours abroad, first to Cairo and the Italian colonies of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, and then, in 1934, to London, Berlin, and Paris.[10] In Paris, he obtained what he considered the highest honor: an invitation to stage Il medico per forza at the Comédie Française, the temple of Molière. He also performed in London at the Little Theatre, in Berlin at the Kurfürstendamm Theater, and in Vienna at the Komödie Theater, where his burlesque impression of Hamlet was considered hilarious.[14]

Petrolini's tomb in Campo Verano, rebuilt after the original was hit in an air raid

In 1923, Petrolini was initiated into Freemasonry.[19]

Petrolini's sympathies for, and impertinences towards, the Fascist regime were complex.[20][2] Petrolini was admired and befriended by Mussolini, even though his Nerone caricature was widely perceived as a parody of the dictator.[21][22] As noted by the critic Oreste Del Buono, the Nerone character – first created by Petrolini in 1917 – may actually have influenced Mussolini's own mannerisms.[2] Although a public supporter of the regime, Petrolini did not refrain from satire, including a famously disrespectful rejoinder after Mussolini had presented him with a medal.[2][23]

Forced to quit the stage in 1935 following a severe attack of angina pectoris, he died aged 52, in Rome, on 29 June 1936.[6][n 2] The corpse, dressed in a tailcoat of his celebrated character Gastone, was buried at the Cemetery of Verano. On 19 July 1943, during the first bombing of Rome, his tomb – a rectangular chapel – was hit, breaking the marble bust and severely damaging the coffin containing the remains of the actor. The renovated tomb bears the epitaph "Dalla bocca tua cantò l'anima di Roma" ("The soul of Rome sang from your mouth").[n 3] [24]

Alberto Sordi interpreting Gastone in the film of the same name (1960) inspired by Petrolini's original creation

Petrolini influenced future generations of Italian comic actors, including Alberto Sordi, Carlo Verdone and Gigi Proietti.[13] His Gastone became a byword in Italian for a certain type of artistic snob and ladies man (and later for a man kissed by fortune, after the Donald Duck character Gladstone Gander was rendered in Italian as "Gastone Paperone").[25][26] In 1960, a film version of Gastone was released, starring Alberto Sordi.[27] The film was directed by Sordi's old friend Mario Bonnard, the man who is thought to have provided the original inspiration for Petrolini's iconic character.[27]

Source: Archivio Petrolini at the Biblioteca e Museo teatrale del Burcardo, Rome.

• Nerone (1930)
• The Doctor in Spite of Himself (1931)
• Courtyard (1931)

Notes

References

• Calò, Annamaria (1989). Ettore Petrolini. La Nuova Italia. ISBN 978-88-221-0740-4. Retrieved 24 July 2012.

• Ettore Petrolini at IMDb
• Petrolini Foundation and Exhibition at the Burcardo Library and Museum of Theater, Rome