Christian De Sica
Christian De Sica (born 5 January, 1951) is an Italian actor, comedian, television presenter, and filmmaker.
Quotes
[edit]- My father always taught me how to do everything. When I told him I wanted to be an actor, he told me to study dubbing, because in his opinion it was the best school. Not the Academy of Dramatic Arts, which sometimes churns out terrible stage actors. "Theatrical actors –he told me– speak 'birignao'. Instead you have to speak dialect, which is true Italian."
- Quoted in Gabriele Rifilato (editor), Dizionario degli attori: Gli attori del nostro tempo, Roma, Rai-Eri, 2005. ISBN 8839712895.
- Dad passed away in my arms on November 13, 1974, at the hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. I was acting in the theater in Milan. My mother called me. I took the first plane. I arrived at the hospital, I saw Dad. The dress attached to the crutch. The blue one. Chalky. Elegant. He had no voice anymore. He said to me: "Christian, give up everything and come away with me, I'll take one last cycle of treatment, then we'll go back to Monte Carlo. Stay close to Mom, Christian,...."
- Acchiappafilm, Deccember 2008.
- Dramatically, Christmas movies are often ordinary, often repetitive, proudly crude. I'm a bit of a movie discount store. Each of them can be dismantled, crushed and reassembled with great ease. They are simple films, but not dishonest.
- Quoted in Paolo Mereghetti]], «Natale a Rio», De Sica-Ghini sulle orme (quasi) di Stanlio e Ollio, Corriere della Sera, 20 December 2008, p. 61.
- [...] comedians don't have sex. They're cartoons. They are sewn in front like dolls.
- Figlio di papà, Mondadori, 2008; quoted in Antonio D'Orrico, Perché non possiamo non dirci Christian(i), Corriere della Sera Magazine, 29 September 2008.
- I have a murderous relative, his name was Ramón Mercader. [...] To this Ramon Mercader Stalin said "go to Mexico City and kill Trotsky". This one started with a pickaxe and gave it to him on the head. He killed the right one too then. He was my uncle.
- Video available on youtube.com; 4 April 2013.
- (About the mother, Maria Mercader) A woman from another time, very nice and witty, completely unconscious. The fascists knocked her house down in Spain, she went to France to act, she was more successful than my father, she was very beautiful, elegant. Then my father locked her in the house and she lived her whole life in love with him, between the hairdresser, card games with my uncles and us children. She was a bit of a victim. In part, it was she who pushed my father to become a director, also to distance him from the theatre and his first wife.
- From an interview by Arianna Ravelli, Christian De Sica: "Voglio fare un film su mia madre", corriere.it, 2 October 2014.
- And then we went to shoot Vacanze in America [Holidays in America], I was a burin priest, Don Buro. We went with Jerry Calà and Paolo Villaggio from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, to the Caesar Palace, and stayed there one night. We had a lot of laughs and then in the end the one who paid the bill was Carlo Vanzina because none of us had a lira anymore, we had lost all the money. And it was up to him to pay for dinner and hotel.
- From an interview by Arianna Finos, Christian De Sica: “Carlo era più bravo di tanti autori che non hanno lasciato il segno”, rep.repubblica.it, 8 July 2018.
- Interview to Christian De Sica, Corriere del Mezzogiorno, 9 April 2006; reported in win.cinemaepsicoanalisi.com
- Naples [...] is the only city where people still greet you with the "good morning" and not with a laconic "night" or "day".
- Our stars were very simple people, it wasn't like in America that to talk to one of them you had to first pass for agents and secretaries. When I wanted to call Alberto Sordi or Peppino De Filippo I dialed their telephone number and spoke directly with them. In Italy, now, stars are those who make reality shows or footballers. Stardom ended in the 1950s and was born after the war because there was hunger and people wanted to dream of a world that was not reality. There was a different naivety than today.
- My father is a master, I am a Sunday painter. It's not true that I imitate him also because my role model is Sordi and like him I have embodied in all these years the role of the Italian trickster, the building worker and I have made some terrible characters sympathetic by staging their weaknesses.
- My father always taught me great respect for industry insiders and everyone who worked in film and always told me, "Ours is a job made on water." Rossellini, on the other hand, didn't like actors and kept telling me, "But why don't you go to Houston to study, why don't you go to college?"
