Tinto Brass, Italian Director Behind Caligula and The Key, Dies at 93 in Rome

Tinto Brass, the Italian film director whose name became linked around the world with erotic cinema, died in Rome on the morning of Wednesday, November 4, at the age of 93. His wife, Caterina Varzi, and his children, Bonifacio and Beatrice Brass, announced his death and informed the Italian news agency ANSA, and the news agency LaPresse reported the death the same day. No cause of death was announced. The family said the funeral would be private.

"It is a difficult moment, of deep sadness and regret," Varzi told the news agency Adnkronos in the hours after his death, Euronews reported. Brass had lived in recent years at Isola Farnese, on the outskirts of Rome, and Varzi, whom he married in 2017, curated his archive.

An avant-garde director first

Giovanni Brass was born in Milan on March 26, 1933, and was most closely associated with Venice, where he grew up. His grandfather Italico Brass, a painter, gave him the nickname Tintoretto, later shortened to Tinto. After graduating in law, Brass moved to Paris and came to cinema through editing at the Cinematheque. Back in Italy he worked with Roberto Rossellini, as an editor on L'India vista da Rossellini and as an assistant director on Il Generale della Rovere.

His first film as a director, Chi lavora e perduto, screened at the Venice Film Festival in 1963 and won favourable reviews. Through the 1960s he experimented across genres, including the crime film Col cuore in gola (1967) and L'urlo, shown in competition at Berlin in 1970. La vacanza, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero, won the film critics prize for the best Italian film at the Venice Film Festival in 1971, and Brass sat on the jury at Berlin in 1972.

Salon Kitty, Caligula and The Key

The turn toward erotic cinema came in the 1970s. Salon Kitty, released in 1976, dealt with sex, power and money in Nazi Berlin. Caligula followed in 1979. Brass had planned the film as a satire on power, but the producers re-edited it without his consent, and he demanded that his name be removed from the credits, leaving him credited for principal photography only. The film remains his most widely viewed work.

In the 1980s came the run of titles that made him famous outside Italy, opening with La chiave, known in English as The Key, with Stefania Sandrelli in 1983. Miranda, Capriccio, Paprika, Cosi fan tutte and Monella followed, and he kept directing into his seventies, with Senso '45 in 2002 and Monamour in 2006. His first wife, Carla Cipriani, a screenwriter who worked on his films, died in 2006.

A final honour in Venice

In September 2026 the Venice Film Festival screened a restored 4K version of Col cuore in gola as its pre-opening film, and the Italian National Union of Film Journalists gave Brass its Pietro Bianchi Award. A fever and his health stopped him travelling from Isola Farnese, and Varzi read his message to the audience on the Lido. "I, who have always given little weight to official recognition, will hold on tight to this one, there will be no other opportunity," he said, according to Euronews. On his 90th birthday he had said he wanted his ashes scattered in the Venice lagoon.