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Pioneering Director Lina Wertmuller to Finally Get Her Oscar

Associated Press

   LOS ANGELES - In 1977, Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmuller became the
   first woman to ever be nominated for best director at the Academy
   Awards. Although she didn't win that year -- "Rockyz" director John G.
   Avildsen did -- the 91-year-old with the famous white glasses will
   finally get an Oscar of her own Sunday at the annual Governors Awards.

   "This is making me very happy," Wertmuller said last month through a
   translator.

   Forty years ago the Federico Fellini-protege barely even registered the
   historic nature of her nomination, however. She was too busy thinking
   about her next film.

   "Lina never gave too much importance to awards," said Valerio Ruiz,
   Wertmuller's biographer. "She left that for other people to talk
   about."

   Ruiz also directed a documentary about Wertmuller called "Behind the
   White Glasses."

   Born in Rome in 1928, Wertmuller had been working in theater, sketch
   comedy and puppetry before making her transition into film. A friend
   from school married actor Marcello Mastroianni and he made the fateful
   introduction to Fellini whom she assisted on the set of "8 1/2."

   "Anything that he would ask her to do she would do," Ruiz said. "He
   would see a face going by in a taxi and he would say 'get me that face'
   and she would chase the taxi."

   The relationship was hardly one-sided. Fellini provided his own crew to
   help Wertmuller make her first film, "The Lizards," in 1963.

   "Fellini was much more than a person and friend,'' Wertmuller said.
   "Fellini was like opening a window and discovering in front of you a
   wonderful landscape which you didn't know before. Our relationship was
   much larger, much deeper and much more meaningful than anything I can
   describe."

   The picture that ultimately caught the attention of the film academy
   was "Seven Beauties," a sprawling story about a man with seven
   unattractive sisters who puts himself on a complicated path during
   World War II when he murders a pimp who turned one of his sisters into
   a sex worker. Roger Ebert called it "opaque, despairing, and
   bottomless" in a review at the time.

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