Mauro Bolognini

Once described as "the most Proustian of Italian film directors", Mauro Bolognini, who has died aged 78, was admired, above all, for his elegant adaptations of literary works, made mostly in the 1960s and 1970s.

He was sometimes maliciously called "the poor man's Visconti", and the director of The Leopard was heard to say, somewhat bitchily, when asked if his projected film of Proust's Recherche would start from Du cté de Chez Swan, "No, I have to leave something for Bolognini."

Born in Pistoia, in Tuscany, Bolognini belonged to that circle of young Florentines in post-fascist Italy, including Franco Zeffirelli and Luchino Visconti, who led the way in bringing back the ideals of the Renaissance in the theatre. He studied architecture in Florence, and, following further work at Rome's Centro Sperimentale film school, became assistant to Luigi Zampa.

After a strictly commercial debut film, Ci troviamo in galleria (1953), set in an Italian Tin Pan Alley with Sophia Loren in the cast, he won critical attention in 1955 with Gli Innamorati, described by one reviewer as "Goldoni-esque" in its light-hearted treatment of youngsters in the back alleys around Rome's Piazza Navona. He took a more pungent look at Roman youth in his next films, the best of which were co-scripted by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Even if Pasolini was not too happy about Bolognini's casting of professionals (and French ones at that, Laurent Terzieff and Jean-Claude Brialy) for his tough Roman lads in La Notte Brava (1959), after seeing the film he admitted that Mauro had been right. The poet's friendship proved invaluable when Fellini's production company rejected Pasolini's projected debut as writer-director, Accattone. Bolognini took the script to his producer Alfredo Bini, who, within days, was able to set up the film, thus saving Pasolini's ambitions to become a director.

Bini had launched his own production company with Bolognini's first, stylish literary adaptation, Il Bell'Antonio (1959), which, in spite of problems with the censors, was a success for everyone concerned. In La Viaccia (1961), he moved the setting from the Siena of Napoleonic times to the Florence of the 1880s, when Mario Pratesi had written the novel, L'enedita. Vasco Pratolini, who had rediscovered it, and collaborated on the script, later entrusted Bolognini with the filming of his own acclaimed novel, Metello. With Piero Tosi's design, and Ennio Guarnieri as cinematographer, Bolognini made a political film that was also a feast for the eyes.

In perhaps his greatest achievement, the adaptation of Italo Svevo's Senilità (1962), Bolognini moved the setting from turn-of-the-century Trieste to the 1920s, Svevo's own times. One of his favourite cinematographers, Armando Nannuzzi, captured magically the defiant grandeur of this Hapsburgian-looking city, and the dramatic contrasts of its Adriatic seascape.

Like most of his colleagues in those years, Bolognini saw no problem with dubbing foreign actors, though, when Italian talents were available, he made good use of them. Though he never learned English, he managed to cope with the seemingly incompatible presence of English-speaking actors, from Anthony Franciosa, as Svevo's hero, to Anthony Quinn, in the 1976 adaptation of Chelli's novel L'eredità Ferramonti, and Julian Sands, the lead in Bolognini's last feature, La Villa del Venerdi (1991), based on a minor Moravia novel.

With French actors, he was always at ease, from that first casting of Terzieff and Brialy, to Jean-Paul Belmondo in La Viaccia. Perhaps Isabelle Huppert's performance as Marie Duplessis in The True Story Of The Lady Of The Camelias (1981) was chilly - but then so was the film. He acquitted himself fairly well with a mini-series for French television of La Chartreuse de Parme (1982).

During the making of La Viaccia, Tosi said he saw Belmondo as a character who might have been painted by Pontormo. Indeed, if Pasolini was Italian cinema's Caravaggio, and Visconti its Michelangelo, perhaps we should remember Bolognini as its Pontormo. The 16th-century Mannerist may have been accused of imitating his maestro, the great Buonarroti, but time showed that he won his own identity as an artist.

Mauro Bolognini, film director, born June 28 1922; died May 14 2001

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