Milena Vukotic, Lifetime Achievement Award at the Bardolino Film Festival

Lifetime Achievement Award to Milena Vukotic

Ms. Vukotic is, in fact, a lady, as well as a great actress who has crossed the cinema, theater and television at a dance pace, acting for many authors, from Fellini to Buñuel, from Scola to Oshima, from Antonioni to Tarkovskij, from Zeffirelli to Jean Cocteau, and then Lina Wertmuller, Monicelli, Risi, Verdone, Ozpetek.

In between, many more commercial films, which you are careful not to ignore. On June 17 Milena Vukotic will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bardolino Film Festival directed by Franco Dassisti, which will have its second edition from 15 to 19 June on the shores of Lake Garda.

“An encouragement to move forward”

The central theme will be the reflection on the relationship between man and the Earth and on the green transition. “This award is the recognition of a lot of work, always done with pleasure,” says Vukotic.

“I take it as an encouragement to move forward. And I am pleased that the festival deals with the environment: it is important that everyone, in their own small way, contributes to supporting the cause ».

Milena Vukotic and Ugo Tognazzi in Come and have coffee with us

“I worked at the Paris Opera”

Let’s go back in time: how did you choose your career as an actress?
In reality I didn’t choose, I breathed the air of home: I come from a family of artists, my father wrote for the theater and was part of the Futurists, my mother was a pianist and composer, a pupil of Respighi.

I have absorbed everything related to an artistic gaze.

I was born in Italy, but the first part of my life took place abroad: London, Vienna, Paris, where I studied at the conservatory and I trained as a dancer, but I also took acting classes with an amazing teacher, Tanya Balashova.

I worked at the Paris Opera for one seasonthen I joined an international company traveling the world for three and a half years, from South America to all of Europe.

One day I saw The street by Fellini and something happened inside me: since my mother lived in Rome I thought it was the right time to move here and try to make movies.

Milena Vukotic and Philippe Noiret with My Friends (1975)

“I was small and not oversized”

Did you ever ask you to change your surname at first?
No, even if it’s not easy, and they’ve always got it a little crippled. My mother was called Nervi, she was a descendant of the architect Pier Luigi Nervi, and at a certain point I thought of adopting that as my stage name: but then I kept my father’s surname, who was Serbian.

He was part of the glorious season of Italian comedy, working with Risi, Salce, Lattuada, Loy, Festa Campanile …
It was a nice enrichment, and I also worked with Scola, Blasetti, Bertolucci, coming to realize my dream of acting for Fellini in Giulietta degli spiriti and Toby Dammit.

But I still remember that director Renato Castellani had told me: «Listen, to make films you have to be extremely beautiful or have a very distinctive typology. Since you have neither one nor the other, I advise you to let it go. ” After all, it was the time of the pluses, and I was very small and thin.

Milena Vukotic and Paolo Villaggio in Fantozzi

Author cinema

But also pretty!
I have never been beautiful, but I can boast of having done many things despite this. After so many years Castellani wanted me to play the role of Contessa Maffei in Verdi’s life, which was a nice role. No, I didn’t remind him of that phrase about him: she hadn’t said it maliciously, for him it was a factual statement. And it no longer mattered.

You have interpreted both arthouse and popular cinema, without distinction.
Ours is a wonderful job, I think I’m very lucky to be able to do what I love. And I have that percentage of unconsciousness that allows me to move beyond criticism of what may be considered by others as unfair. I am happy with everything I have done.

Kika

From theater to cinema

The ability to move from theater to film to television is also rare.
But you know, at the base there is always the pleasure of acting, maintaining the awareness that it is a game: having lived so much abroad I am lucky enough to speak five languages, including my father’s Serbian, and I know that in English recitare is said to play, in German spiel, in French jouer. So for me it is important to always find the childlike dimension of playing.

Pina… by chance

How did you get the role of Mrs. Pina?
Paolo Villaggio called me to propose it to me in view of the third Fantozzi, because Liù Bosisio had played the first two. And with him, as with Neri Parenti who would become the director of the saga from the third film, I lived a relationship of great harmony. When you start a new job you create a kind of family and every time we shot the Fantozzi – I did 8! – it was a reunion. Even today Plinio Fernando, who played our daughter Mariangela, calls me from time to time, and Elisabetta, Paolo’s daughter, directed me to the theater.

Milena Vukotic in Dancing with the stars

Friend of Lino Banfi

Does it bother you to always be remembered for that role?
Very often I am recognized for that alone, but the important thing is to know that I have entered people’s hearts.

Also with Lino Banfi, her husband in the series A doctor in the familydid a friendship develop?
With Banfi I had already acted in a couple of films with Fenech, but for A doctor in the family we lived almost twenty years of coexistence, because each series consisted of twenty-six episodes and we shot about ten. That too has become a family: Eleonora Cadeddu, who played Annuccia, was two and a half years old when we started and now she is twenty-seven: I met her the other day at a screening and it’s always nice to see each other again.

“I try to remember to always be honest”

Perhaps having maintained harmonious relations with everyone is due to his good character.
Our work is difficult, we have to adapt to each other, understand each other, and consequently get in tune. Otherwise how do you do it? We are struggling with each other’s soul, even if it is a fictitious, momentary exchange. But within this fiction we have to find something true.

When Villaggio asked me to play Pina Fantozzi he said: we are cartoons. But cartoons come to life if they are nurtured with a certain authenticity, and I always try to remember to be honest.

Even in Gian Burrasca (where she was Giannino’s sister, Virginia, ed) we interpreted caricatures, which however had something true inside. Giorgio Strehler, with whom I worked for a season, said: it’s fine to act in the Goldonian style, epic or naturalistic, but the most important thing is to be authentic.

Then you can frame your work in one style, but the truth remains the basis.

Dancing with the stars 2019

Wedding at 68 years old

She is eighty-seven and looks twenty younger. Her secret?
I don’t know, maybe dance, which is very good physically. Then I think it is important to do what you love, because it gives you a very strong vital energy.

She got married at 68 with Alfredo Baldi: why so late?
I lived with my mom in this house until she left and I never had the desire to get married – to have children yes, but it hasn’t happened and I know I’ve always been very self but and independent.

When she left I felt a bit lost, and then there was the meeting with Alfredo, who worked at the Experimental Center as a didactic director and was separated with two already grown children.

It was he who cared about marriage, coming from a very regular family. My life, on the other hand, is anything but regular, but within this precariousness I have always found my balance.

If you were to take stock of your career and life today, what would you say?
I’m ready to start again!

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