Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni (September 26, 1924 - December 19, 1996) was an Academy Award nominated Italian film actor, considered by many the best Italian actor of all time.

Born in Fontana Liri, a small village in the Apennines, Mastroianni grew up in Turin and Rome. During World War II he was interned in a Nazi prison, but he escaped and hid in Venice.

In 1945 he started working for a film company and began taking acting lessons. His film debut was in I Miserabili (1947).

He soon became a major international star, starring in Big Deal on Madonna Street; and in Federico Fellini's La dolce vita with Anita Ekberg in 1960, where he played a disillusioned and self-loathing tabloid columnist who spends his days and nights exploring Rome's high society.

Mastroianni followed La dolce vita with another signature role, that of a film director who, amidst self-doubt and troubled love affairs, finds himself in a creative block while making a movie in Fellini's 8½.

Mastroianni was married to Italian actress Flora Carabella (1926 - 1999) from 1948 until his death. They had one child together, Barbara. His brother Ruggero Mastroianni (1929 - 1996) was a highly regarded film editor who not only edited a number of his brother's films, but appeared alongside Marcello in Scipione detto anche l'Africano, a sword and sandals film released in 1971.

He also had a daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, with the actress Catherine Deneuve, his longtime lover during the seventies. Both Flora and Catherine were at his bedside when he died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 72, as was his partner at the time, author and filmmaker Anna Maria Tato.

According to Christopher Wiegand and Paul Duncan in their book Federico Fellini, when Mastroianni died in 1996, the Trevi Fountain, which is so famously associated with him due to his role in Fellini's La dolce vita, was symbolically turned off and draped in black as a tribute.

With Jack Lemmon, Mastroianni is the only actor to have won twice Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival: in 1970 for Dramma della gelosia - tutti i particolari in cronaca and in 1987 for Dark Eyes.

Marcello Mastroianni was born in 1924, in Fontana Liri, Italy, but soon his family moved to Turin and then Rome. During WW2 he was sent to a German prison camp, but he managed to escape and hide in Venice. In 1945 he started working for the Italian department of "Eagle Lion Films" in Rome and joined a drama club, where he was discovered by director Luchino Visconti. He made his "official" movie debut in the film Miserabili, I (1948) and Bella mugnaia, La (1955). In 1957 Visconti gave him the starring part in his Fyodor Dostoyevsky adaptation Notti bianche, Le (1957) and in 1958 he was fine as a little thief in Mario Monicelli's comedy Soliti ignoti, I (1958). But his real breakthrough came in 1960, when Federico Fellini cast him as an attractive, weary-eyed journalist of the Rome jet-set in Dolce vita, La (1960); that film was the genesis of his "Latin lover" persona, which Mastroianni himself often denied by accepting parts of passive and sensitive men. He would again work with Fellini in several major films, like the exquisite 8½ (1963) (as a movie director who finds himself at a point of crisis) and the touching Ginger e Fred (1986) (as an old entertainer who appears in a TV show). He also appeared as a tired novelist with marital problems in Michelangelo Antonioni's Notte, La (1961), as an impotent young man in Mauro Bolognini's Bell'Antonio, Il (1960) , as an exiled prince in John Boorman's Leo the Last (1970), as a traitor in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Allonsanfan (1973) and as a sensitive homosexual in love with a housewife in Ettore Scola's Giornata particolare, Una (1977). During the last decade of his life he worked with directors, like Theodoros Angelopoulos, Bertrand Blier and Raoul Ruiz, who gave him three excellent parts in Trois vies & une seule mort (1996). He died of pancreatic cancer in 1996.