Italian actress, remarKable in her ability to incarnate such antithetical film-making modes as auteur cinema and coMmedia all'italiana, and in her power, as a woman, to penetrate cinematic terrain previously restricted to men. As the privileged vehicle for Michelangelo Antonioi's exploration of modernist consciousness in the 1960s, Vitti became intimately associated with the auteurist movement in Italy. Later, as the 'queen' of coMmedia all'ialiana, she helped break the all-male hold on the genre through the creation of her own, enormously successful comic-grotesque persona.

Vitti attended the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica and enjoyed early success in the theatre. She made her cinematic debut in Mario Amendola's Le dritte (1958), but it was Antonioni's tetralogy L'avventura (1960), La notte/The Night (1961), L'eclisse/The Eclipse (1962) and Deserto rosso/The Red Desert (1964) that won her international acclaim and established her reputation as an actress of considerable talent. In her portrayal of deeply troubled middle-class women, unable to establish satisfying relationships and incapable of connecting with their environment, the glamorous blonde Vitti came to embody the modernist dilemma in all its complexity and angst. 'The female consciousness', claimed Antonioni, 'is the best filter of reality I know', and Vitti, with her intensely cerebral performance style, provided the perfect vehicle for the film-maker's own alienated, highly abstract vision of the real.

Vitti's image underwent a sea-change in the late 1960s with her award-winning performance in Mario Monicelli's* comedy La ragazza con la pistola/The Girl with a Pistol (1968). In Ettore Scola's proletarian tragi-comedy Dramma della gelosia: tutti i particolari in cronaca (1970), ingeniously entitled The Pizza Triangle in English, Vitti played the common love object of Marcello Mastroianni and Giancarlo Giannini and established her international reputation as comedienne.

Just as Vitti came to feel constrained by her role as alienated woman in the 1960s, however, so she began to chafe at the limitations imposed by her type-casting in commedia all'italiana. The late 1970s were a time of reassessment and experimentation - she accepted Michael Ritchie's invitation to perform a different type of role in An Almost Perfect Affair (1979, US), then rejoined Antonioni in the critically disappointing Il mistero di Obenvald/The Oberwald Mystery (1980), and reappeared on screen, after a hiatus of two years, in the first directorial effort of photographer Roberto Russo, Flirt (she married Russo in 1995).

1986 marked her return to the theatre, both as teacher and actress. In the 1990s, Vitti has performed and directed for television, and has sponsored the careers of such young directors as Francesca Archibugi and Massimo Guglielmi. Vitti's debut as a film director came in 1990 with Scandalo segreto/Secret Scandal (starring Elliott Gould and Catherine Spaak), which was well received critically but met with limited box-office success.