#chiaroscuro

The cause of his death was never disclosed.

He was seventy-seven years old when his friends alerted the police after not being able to contact him for a few days.

They found him lying in his bed in Beverly Hills.

He died on July 2, 2016.

Standing at 1.65 m tall and with a steel character, he was called the Napoleon of Hollywood.

About fifteen years prior, he was interviewed by Vanity Fair, and the reporter struggled to recognize him; he looked like a different person, with bleached hair, he had become extremely thin, had an androgynous appearance, and his face was now marred by plastic surgery procedures. False rumors circulated about a sex change and his severe addiction to alcohol and drugs, propagated by a press eager to destroy the human and artistic image of one of the most visionary directors of the new Hollywood.

He had nothing in common with that enfant prodige who seemed a step away from the top of Hollywood in the 1970s.

With "The Deer Hunter" in '78 (his second film), in Italian "Il Cacciatore," he took home 5 Oscars.


From childhood, I have never been
like others; I have never seen
as others saw; I could not derive
my emotions from a common source;
but pain never from the same source.
I could not awake my heart
to joy with the same tone as others;
all that I loved, I loved alone.

Then, in my childhood, dawn
of a life much tormented,
the mystery that still envelops me
emerged from every depth of good and evil:
from torrent or from spring,
from the red crag of the mountain,
from the sun that turned around me
in its golden autumn colors,
from the light that approached in the sky
as it passed near me,
from thunder and storm
from the cloud that took the shape
(the other sky was clear)
of a demon in my eyes.

.:. Edgar Allan Poe .:.