The British journalist John Francis Lane, who has died aged 89, provided a vivid running commentary on Italian cinema for more than half a century, from the last great years of neorealism up to the present. He came to know many of the leading directors and stars and worked for a time as a publicist in Cinecittà, Hollywood-on-the-Tiber as it was called, and also as an actor, playing cameo parts in many films made there.
He lost count of the precise number – the IMDb database lists 29 movie and TV appearances – but he thought the actual figure was much higher. Some of them, for Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francesco Rosi and others, became classics. The experience greatly enriched his insight into, as he put it, the “often bizarre methods of film-making in Italy” as well as into the industry’s great achievements.
His work as an advocate and interpreter of Italian film and theatre culture to the English-speaking world was recognised by the state as long ago as 1975, when he was made Cavaliere dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica. “What I enjoy most about living in Italy is that you never know quite when theatre ends and reality begins,” he noted in a diary in 1959.
Later he wrote: “I suppose it was also true in my private life.”
This ambiguity partly explains his affinity with Fellini – both the man and the work. In Fellini’s Roma (1972), when the camera is threading through a hubbub of diners in the street, a voice is heard to say: “That’s the American writer Gore Vidal over there – let’s talk to him.”
And there he is, sharing a table with a long-haired Lane, also playing himself. By the time of Roma, Lane had known Fellini for more than a decade. In one of their encounters, he had managed to appropriate a pad of the master’s notepaper with each page headed by Fellini’s self-portrait caricature – Fellini was kinder to himself in this respect than he sometimes was to others.
His caricature of Lane showed the critic naked, portly and with an anatomically fixed peacock’s feather waving behind him. Favoured acquaintances might receive an occasional letter from Lane on a stolen sheet of Fellini’s personal stationery, which he eked out and conferred on friends like parodic honours for the rest of his life.
What had brought him and Fellini together was La Dolce Vita (1960) in which Lane played one of the reporters attending a press conference given by the glamorous Sylvia, the role through which Anita Ekberg achieved filmic immortality by wading exuberantly in the Trevi fountain. He and Fellini had established a friendly relationship during the filming and the director asked him to prepare an English-language version of the script and to supervise the film’s dubbing into English.
When they met in London at that time, Lane asked Fellini why he put so many “freaks” into his films. “Caro Francescone [Dear big Francis],” Fellini replied, “look around you.”
“At least,” Lane recalled, “he didn’t tell me to look in the mirror.”
Freak was a word that Lane used without apparent bitterness to describe his own position as an outsider, as someone living in opposition to the conventions of the English middle-class life into which he had been born.
Much later, he provisionally gave one of several attempts at autobiography the title A Freak in Rome. He explained that he would try to recall the three main activities of his adult life: the first, as a film and theatre critic, columnist and actor; the second, as a middle-class Englishman who had set out to discover the riches of Italian culture; and the third, “as a shameless homosexual enjoying the joys and sorrows of Italian male company”.
He was very keen that his story should incorporate an honest account of his love life, not excluding its eroticism. In the end, when the autobiography appeared in 2013, although frank enough, it carried the calmer, kinder title To Each His Own Dolce Vita.
So far as it went, Lane had a good education, the main part of it taking place against the background of the second world war. He was born in Tankerton, a suburb of Whitstable in Kent, into a comfortably off middle-class family. He had been sent first to a school in London which was evacuated at the outbreak of the war. He then became a boarder at the Royal grammar school in Worcester, followed towards the end of the war by Dulwich college, London. His father died in 1943 and Lane persuaded his mother to let him leave after only a year and enrol in drama school in Highgate.
He gained experience in both acting and directing at the school, and had a spell as a stage manager in the West End. In early 1948 he signed up to study French at the Sorbonne in Paris and enrolled on a film course at the young but already prestigious Idhec – l’Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques. He first visited Italy as a tourist from Paris, in 1949, and studied Italian at the University of Florence before settling in Rome in 1951.
There he lived for 46 years, surviving initially on a small legacy, then through a routine job with the FAO, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. At the same time, he was involved in the more congenial task of trying to build an income as a stringer for several Fleet Street papers.
He had arrived with a confirmed passion for Italian cinema, and had already contributed his first article, on Idhec itself, to the British Film Institute’s periodical, Sight & Sound. He became the correspondent of the monthly Films and Filming from its first issue, in 1954, and continued to write for it until the early 1980s. Subsequently, he was the Rome correspondent of Screen International, contributing to it from 1985 until the mid-90s. Then a street accident made it difficult for him to climb the stairs to his beloved attic apartment and effectively ended his long sojourn in the capital.
His own direct involvement in the movie business had begun in the winter of 1956 when he met David Hanna, who was then working as a film publicist in Cinecittà, and asked Lane to stand in for him.
Suddenly, he found himself inside the world he had observed only as an outsider, and before long the invitations to play cameo roles started to arrive. Only rarely in the coming years did his dual career as reporter and actor cause problems. One such occasion came when Richard Burton vetoed his presence on the set of Cleopatra (1963), the backdrop to Burton’s “tumultuous” (in publicist’s parlance) love affair with Elizabeth Taylor. By then Lane was in demand, partly perhaps for the very reason that his presence promised publicity. One of his last appearances was as a cardinal in Liliana Cavani’s Francesco (1989), a life of St Francis starring Mickey Rourke.
During the 60s, he also made occasional appearances in the theatre. In 1963, the year before Peter Daubeny launched the first of his wonderful World Theatre seasons at the Aldwych, London, Lane helped him bring the Italian actor Vittorio Gassman to London.
This was a huge success, and Lane continued to collaborate with Daubeny over Italian contributions to his Aldwych seasons in the following years. In his autobiography, My World of Theatre (1971), Daubeny pays warm tribute to him. Lane’s close friendship with the Neapolitan actor and playwright Eduardo de Filippo, to whom he also introduced Daubeny, helped him to bring De Filippo to London in 1972 to star in one of his most famous plays, Napoli Milionaria.
Lane continued to play the role of creative go-between throughout his career. For example, he introduced the film director Michael Radford to the Neapolitan actor Massimo Troisi who starred – in his last role – in Radford’s Oscar-nominated Il Postino (1994).
In 1970 Lane translated into Italian Samuel Beckett’s Not I and coached Laura Betti for her performance of it in the Rome Municipal theatre – something he mentioned in passing in her obituary, which he wrote for the Guardian in 2004, 30 years after his first contribution to the paper – a survey of recent Italian movies headed “Rome still makes masterpieces for the cinema”.
In retirement Lane lived in the town of Rende, in Calabria, in a flat in the home and within the extended family of an Italian friend who offered him, he would tell friends, the affection and protection he said he had never found in his years of “Roman philandering”. From there, he wrote frequently on Italian life for the Economist. He also wrote reviews and reflections for Il Quotidiano, the daily newspaper in nearby Cosenza.
Some 60 of his obituaries, almost all of leading figures from Italian cinema and theatre, have preceded his own on this page in the Guardian. It was the most recent of these, that of Franco Zeffirelli, that prompted the belated news from Italy that he had died there more than a year ago, latterly living quietly enclosed in a country, and a community, that had truly become his own. He had a rare and deep appreciation of Italy’s cultural life and never tired of commending it to others.
• John Francis Lane, critic, journalist and actor, born 1 December 1928; died 15 January 2018
