Marcello Mastroianni@100...He Never Really Knew How to Lie and He was Lazy

Shawn Levy, "Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome", 2016:  

 

"...Two things distinguished the young Marcello Mastroianni, according to those who knew him best and longest, and they remained essential truths about him, in important ways, throughout his varied and extraordinary life and career.

One, in the words of his mother, was “He never really knew how to lie. . . . I’d tell him not to bother to go on. He had such a simple face, like an open book.”

The other he himself declared in interviews for decades: “I am,” he would say, explaining some decision he’d made (or, more often, hadn’t made), “lazy.”

Both traits—an inability to dissemble and an inveterate indolence—were, it happened, perfect tools for the profession in which Mastroianni would become famous. On the one hand, he was at his absolute best as an actor when cast as someone whom he understood instinctively, someone whose experiences and attitudes were so natural to him that they might as well have been his own. On the other, his aversion to preparation, to study, even to learning scripts, lent his work an air of spontaneity, discovery, and immediacy that might have been lacking if he had put in more effort...."

 

 with Claudia Cardinale in "Il bell'Antonio", 1960