Tinto Brass, Caligula director and Euro erotica maestro, dies aged 93

Italian film director Tinto Brass has died at the age of 93, his family said to Italian news agency ANSA on Wednesday. His wife Caterina Varzi and their children Bonifacio and Beatrice Brass confirmed the news. Brass, who was once described as the “Antonioni of the 70s”, became renowned for bringing Italian erotic cinema to a wider audience.

Born in Milan and brought up in Venice, Brass began his cinema career after moving to Paris, where he worked as an editor and archivist at the Cinémathèque. Returning to Italy, he served as an editor and assistant director to Roberto Rossellini. In 1964, Umberto Eco commissioned him to produce two short films experimenting with visual language for the Triennale di Milano, and Warner Bros later approached him to direct A Clockwork Orange before the job went to Stanley Kubrick due to scheduling conflicts.

During the 1970s Brass turned to erotic cinema, creating works that combined explicit nudity with political commentary on sex, power and money. He explained his motivation to La Repubblica, saying, “I made so many erotic films because I believed eroticism to be a fundamental key to human expression and, above all, the key to portraying women.”

His 1976 “Nazisploitation” film Salon Kitty, based on a real Berlin brothel used by the Nazis, attracted the attention of Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, who hired Brass in 1979 to direct Caligula. The film starred Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud, using a screenplay by Gore Vidal that Brass rewrote to add orgies and decorative phalluses. Vidal later disavowed the film, and Brass also rejected it after Guccione inserted unsimulated hardcore scenes without his consent. Caligula opened in the UK and US in 1980 with Brass credited only for “principal photography”, and a recut version without Guccione’s inserts was released in 2023, though Brass was not involved.

In his later years Brass lived in Isola Farnese on Rome’s outskirts. He is survived by his wife Varzi, whom he married in 2017 and who curated his archive, and by his children. In an interview marking his 90th birthday, he said he wanted his ashes scattered in the Venice lagoon.