Tinto Brass, Director of 'Caligula' and 'Salon Kitty,' Dies at 93

Tinto Brass, the Italian director behind the erotic epics Caligula and Salon Kitty, has died at 93. His family announced the death on Wednesday to the Italian press agency Ansa.

Brass was born in Milan in 1933 into a Venetian family of artists. He began by studying law, then pivoted to film in the late 1950s. That pivot took him to Paris, where he worked as an archivist at the Cinémathèque Française, met Roberto Rossellini and served as an assistant on Rossellini's war drama General della Rovere.

How did censors shape his career?

Brass made his directorial debut in 1963 with In Capo Al Mondo, later retitled Chi Lavora è Perduto. The Venice-set film followed a young unemployed man with antisocial tendencies and earned enthusiastic acclaim at the Venice Film Festival. It also ran into major problems with Italian censors — the first of many such battles Brass would fight, for various reasons, across his career.

He spent much of the late 1960s and early 1970s in London shooting English-language films. The 1967 erotic pop thriller Deadly Sweet starred Jean-Louis Trintignant as a young man who discovers his business contact has been murdered. Rather than call the police, he protects a young woman, played by Sweden's Ewa Aulin, and pursues the real killers, putting him on a collision course with the London underworld. The film screened out of competition at the 1967 Venice International Film Festival, and a restored version played at Venice earlier this year as a tribute to Brass. It was followed by Attraction (1969) and Dropout (1970).

What happened with 'Caligula'?

Brass broke out internationally with the 1976 erotic war drama Salon Kitty, set in a high-class Berlin brothel used by the Nazi intelligence service and starring Helmut Berger.

But his best-known film outside Italy remains Caligula, shot in 1979 and released in 1984 in a cut different from the one Brass intended. Penthouse founder Bob Guccione self-financed the film in 1980. After fighting with Brass and screenwriter Gore Vidal, Guccione seized control of the project and discarded the script. He then shot adult content after the actors — among them Helen Mirren, Malcolm McDowell, John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole — had finished their scenes. Brass and Vidal sued to have their names removed from the picture.

In 1983, Brass directed The Key, an adaptation of a novel by Japanese author Tanizaki Junichiro starring Stefania Sandrelli. The film marked a turn toward more highbrow eroticism that played well globally. It was followed by works centered on the sexual liberation of their female characters, including Black Angel (2002) and Fallo (2003).

Brass is survived by his wife, Caterina Varzi, and his children, Bonifacio and Beatrice Brass.

His death closes a career that spanned six decades and dozens of run-ins with censors — a body of work that Venice itself chose to honor this year with a restored revival of Deadly Sweet.