Visconti, Luchino

Visconti, Luchino (1906–76), Italian director and scene designer, who as a young man went to Paris and became involved in film production. Although much of his early work was in films, he directed plays in Milan in 1937, and in 1945 introduced plays by a number of European dramatists, particularly Cocteau, into the repertory of the Teatro Eliseo in Rome, where in 1948 he staged Shakespeare's As You Like It in Italian as Rosalinda. In 1946, in which year he directed Beaumarchais's Le Mariage de Figaro, he joined the Paolo Stoppa—Rina Morelli company, for which he staged such modern works as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie in 1946, Anouilh's Eurydice in 1947, Miller's Death of a Salesman in 1951, and his A View from the Bridge in 1958. Among his other productions were Chekhov's Three Sisters (1952) and Uncle Vanya (1955) and, in Paris in 1961, a sumptuous version of Ford's ‘Tis Pity She's a Whore, as Dommage qu'elle soit putain. He worked on Troilus and Cressida in Florence, and also on Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. His later work was mainly in films and in opera, but he returned to live theatre in 1973 to direct Pinter's Old Times in Rome, a production disowned by the author.