“Sono always, desperately, looking for a failure. I say this with coquetry, of course, but with a grain of truth: I prefer to choose something that, on paper, is not safe ».
Désolé, will be for another time. Pour un oui ou pour un non (For yes or for no) – the play by Nathalie Sarraute, directed by Pier Luigi Pizzi, on tour until May – appeals to critics and audiences. We are passionate about the confrontation between two old friends (with Umberto Orsini, there is Franco Branciaroli) on the reasons for their progressive estrangement, a confrontation that starts as a challenge with semantic subtleties to end up in a game to the massacre.
Umberto Orsini with Franco Branciaroli (photo Amati Bacciardi).
A risky bet
“It was a fairly risky bet, but Franco and I said to each other: we have the alibi of the pandemic, we will not suffer the psychological repercussions if it goes wrong” smiles Orsini an hour from the start of the show at Piccolo from Milan. “You feel our” flight hours “: there are, in a subliminal way, Bernhard, Strindberg, Pirandello … We are like two very fast tennis players – not two of the retired club – who throw the ball into the corners and send it back in a amazing”. A non-accidental metaphor: tennis is a passion of the actor, who in 2022 celebrates 88 prodigious years and 65 career, from his debut in Anne Frank’s diary and in Sweet life to the record of TV ratings with The Karamazov brothers through extravagances as Emmanuelle the anti-virgin.
We expected a performance like this to require a long concentration in the dressing room first.
Today there are guys who concentrate for hours and then stammer on stage. Ours is a profession, I don’t believe in “sacred fire”. Indeed, it is a non-trade, being based on nothing codifiable. In reality, I work a lot on preparation, both from the point of view of the text and of the technique: the words must reach the last row of the spectators. We recite without a microphone, now an unusual prerogative while it should be the base, as if one had listened to the microphone Callas!
His athleticism on stage is striking.
When I learn the part, I repeat it while running and, afterwards, I repeat it again with a pencil between my teeth to improve the diction. On stage, in comparison, it’s a breeze. Although, in truth, I have never based myself on the “beautiful voice”. On the contrary, I have tried to disguise it: I hate self-satisfied ranting.
Umberto Orsini’s debut in “The Diary of Anne Frank”.
Eh, the actresses …
Orsini & Branciaroli, two company leaders to share the scene. Are actors’ ego (and rivalries) just clichés?
Maybe once – when we were reciting theOthello (in 1995, under the direction of Gabriele Lavia, ed) – we were more competitive, now no: there is great complicity. Together in 1989 we dealt with it as well Besucher – yes, a sensational failure – by Botho Strauss, directed by Luca Ronconi. For me it is more difficult to work with actresses, with a few exceptions: Valeria Moriconi taught me a lot. Up until the year 2000 I had an erroneous idea of theater: I was very rigorous, rigid, I censored every feeling. Working with her – and at the same time with Luca De Filippo – I realized I had to give myself a little more to the public. Without pleasing him or letting myself be influenced, huh.
Maybe the concessions, in reality, he has to make to himself.
In fact … I was a cold actor, I think I’ve gotten hotter, more human. I also learned from Lavia: ours Masnadieri – from Schiller – they were a triumph, many young people of the Eighties were marked by that show, which brought the Elysée subscribers to sixteen thousand, a crazy quota.
His teachers?
I owe it to Luchino Visconti – who would later direct me to The Arialda, A long time ago and, at the cinema, The fall of the Gods And Ludwig – my thunder for the theater. I fell in love with it one evening in 1951 at the Nuovo in Milan, attending its historic staging of Death of a traveling salesman with Paolo Stoppa, Rina Morelli and, in the role of their children, Giorgio De Lullo and Marcello Mastroianni. Arthur Miller was my author-guide, the backbone of my path: I brought that text on TV in 1968 (I was playing the son of Stoppa and Morelli), concluding the cycle in the role of the father, alongside Giulia Lazzarini, in 1998.
No, no: don’t run. What had been there before that evening at the Nuovo?
There had been a baby son of a restaurateur from Novara (his mother was a cook). There had been a sciuscià: at 11, with the arrival of the allied troops, I bought cigarettes from English soldiers to resell them … There had been a restless teenager, determined only to avoid the city’s People’s Bank at all costs, where everyone fell because it represented the safe place. The province at the time was more “distant” from the metropolises: to say, today we find identical shops everywhere. We were like the Moraldo dei Vitelloni di Fellini: we dreamed of leaving the country and taking the train to Rome.
Umberto Orsini with Rossella Falk in 1967 in “Put an evening at dinner”.
“Sign of destiny”
And she took that train.
Not now. At the beginning I took one for Milan, where I had enrolled in Law, while working as an assistant to a notary. And it was the notary’s secretaries who prompted me to apply for enrollment at the Silvio D’Amico Academy of Dramatic Art: according to them, from how I read the proceedings, it was clear that I was born an actor. Surprisingly they accepted me and in the compartment for Rome I met – a sign of destiny? – Orson Welles. I had not finished the courses that Romolo Valli had already called me in the Compagnia dei Giovani. I was lucky, having no vocation for acting.
Another coquetry.
No, that’s it. And it is clear to me every time I revisit my story, as has already happened with the autobiography (Sold Out, published in 2019 by Laterza, ed) and recently: I am working – prompted and with the collaboration of Massimo Popolizio – on a theatrical text, Before the storm: protagonist an actor who to make-up, preparing for a representation of the Thunderstorm of Strindberg, is lost in memories. Talk to his father – “Dad, you didn’t love me! You never picked me up! ” (yell out) – or comment on the letter of a disturbing admirer … But they don’t have to be “the memories of the actor Orsini”, they have to be the memories of an Italian. And which Italian has met as many people, as many television-film-literary myths as I have?
When will we see it?
There is no certainty other than the ending, where I tell about Rossella Falk, with whom I lived an intense love, which turned into a strong friendship. We lived close by in the Roman countryside and, when a stroke hit her, to give her the joy of contact with the stage, I went to her: “Will Rossella help me review the part?”. I deliberately made a mistake in the accents as it happened to me at the beginning, with her reprimanding me: “Non béne, Novarese: bène!”. Or – I who usually learn parts by heart easily – pretended to forget a word, so he suggested it to me.
Umberto Orsini with Ellen Kessler in the Sixties (photo LaPresse).
Ellen & the others
But did love or friendship count more in your life?
Friendship. The loves pass, the friendship remains. And, after all, friendship has included loves: I have always maintained contact with my exes. Once I found myself at a table with five friends and, suddenly, I realized that I had been in bed – at different times – with all of them! But I have never boasted of my conquests and now it would be even absurd: to a thirty-year-old reader what does the name of Laura Antonelli evoke?
Mina’s, however, yes.
Ah but there was no flirtation with her! I loved it when we shot I kiss … you kiss (a “musicarello” from 1961, ed). I liked all the actresses I worked with: Virna Lisi, Romy Schneider, Sylvia Kristel. And with some, yes, I have also been in my life: this job offered you enormous opportunities, without being rich you had more possibilities than Agnelli. Today it is no longer the case for theater actors (who – by the way – get married early), they don’t have that appeal. They have been replaced, perhaps, by the players.
Have you ever thought about marriage?
No. For me, the family was irreconcilable with the profession. If the relationship with Ellen Kessler lasted a long time, it was because work often kept us away, the sense of novelty did not fade. I have never had any regrets, I am even happy. Let’s imagine that in this instant a 65-year-old son opens the door: “Dad, how are you?”. Brrr …
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