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Italian neorealist film director and screenwriter who made Last Days of Mussolini, starring Rod Steiger

Carlo Lizzani, who has died aged 91, after falling from a balcony at his home, was a screenwriter and director of Italian neorealist cinema who made more than 40 feature films, as well as documentaries and television series.

His first professional experiences in the film world were as an actor, playing cameos in two powerful neorealist films: Il Sole Sorge Ancora (The Sun Still Rises, 1946), directed by Aldo Vergano; and Caccia Tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947), Giuseppe De Santis's first feature film.

In 1947 Roberto Rossellini summoned Lizzani to Berlin where he was preparing to shoot Germania Anno Zero (Germany Year Zero). Lizzani did research with East German locals which Rossellini would find useful when the film was being made without a definitive shooting script. Lizzani said later: "Rossellini filmed the story of the boy [Edmund] as if growing up...

Italian writer-director Carlo Lizzani has died at the age of 91, after jumping to his death from the third-floor balcony of his apartment. Variety reports that Lizzani left behind a note indicating his death was a suicide. After an early career as a film critic, Lizzani entered the arena as co-writer and actor on Aldo Vergano’s 1946 film Outcry, an early example of postwar Italian neo-realism. Two years later, he worked on the script of the Germany Year Zero, the last in the “war trilogy” of one of the fathers of neo-realism, Roberto Rossellini. In 1950, he earned ...