Luchino Visconti

Italian film director, born November 2, 1906 in Milan, Italy and died March 17, 1976 in Rome, Italy. Born a count in one of northern Italy's six richest families, Luchino Visconti was adrift until he was thirty, when Coco Chanel decided he should work in movies and got him a job as third assistant director on a film by Jean Renoir. His own debut as a director came after seven years, during which time he learned the trade and dated the photographer Horst. Of his twenty films, most praised are The Leopard, which Twentieth Century Fox butchered in its English version, The Damned, which earned him his first Oscar nomination, The Stranger, based on Camus' classic, Rocco and his Brothers, with its open subplot of the boxing coach who pays young fighters for sex, and Death in Venice, from Thomas Mann's number one ranked novel on Publishing Triangle's list of the 100 best lgbt books. At sixty-nine, Visconti died of a heart attack in Rome.