Is dead just days after his ninety birthday, Giovanna Cau , the lawyer of Italian cinema, legendary figure as a confidant and counselor of authors, directors and actors. Born in Rome, on 11 march 1923 and grew up in a roman family borghese, it was the relay, the resistance at the end of the occupation of Rome, with a diploma at the Liceo Tasso in 1941, she graduated in law and has opened his first, tiny studio in 1947, with his colleague Sergio: Adam.
in Addition to the work in the studio Giovanna Cau has been a figure of reference in the field of political and social engagement: join the women’s movement for women’s vote in 1946 (along with Laura Ingrao, Elena Cats Caporaso, Rita Montagnana, Nilde Iotti), approaches to the Communist Party, attends the intellectuals to design the Italian renaissance of the post-war period. After a few years of apprenticeship he entered the listed law firm Cortina-Alatri, the first to take care of matters in the cinema. It was one of the first five women to the legal profession in the Capital, but the familiarity of characters such as Moravia, Calvino, Visconti, Natalia Ginzburg draws inexorably towards the problems of copyright, of the legislation on the cinema and the publishing industry until it has become a specialist in the west of the field. In his study calling the actors (first of all the friend of a lifetime, Marcello Mastroianni), and for some it becomes the agent, confidant, and even, responsible for the communication before the invention of the printing offices. Behind his desk, a cigarette always lit, and protected by thick glasses, the lawyer for the Atos has been for decades – says Giuliano Montaldo in the documentary that she has dedicated Marco Spagnoli, Unlike the young – “the witness of the Italian cinema”. “Apparently a mastiff that barks and bites, in reality, a creature sweet” defines Paolo Virzì. “His study – said Ettore Scola – it was a meeting place, a sort of matrimonial agency movie theater where you got engagement parties, unions more or less lasting and also divorce”.
The political passion, however, has never given up on finishing to yield to the repeated invitations of his friend Walter Veltroni, and preside over par her a seat in the senatorial to the Municipality of Rome where, since 2003, had the proxies for cultural policies and attention to the disabled. “I have taken said, joking – because my customers of the cinema and culture I did earn a lot of money, and why, when I walk with a cane, I learned how difficult it is to turn to Rome”. Four years later, in 2007, is candid in his Rome, always in favour of Veltroni, obtaining a record of preferences, but it does not renew its institutional commitment preferring to return to the cinema, where all of life was in the first row, in the most fierce battles associative.
also Involved a lot in social is greeted by the Italian Association of people down, who defines it as “an important presence” of that world. Companion for more than 30 years, the psychiatrist Emilio Benincasa Ponds, Giovanna Cau has been awarded both the David of Donatello from the Syndicate of film Journalists. “When you have the opportunity to continue to work, as it happens to me that I do a profession that I, and you have more young people,” he said.
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