Prime minister Matteo Renzi says death of film-maker who directed 41 films over nearly 40 years 'leaves a huge void in Italian culture'
The film director Ettore Scola, a leading figure in Italian cinema for more than three decades, has died at the age of 84.
Scola's work included A Special Day, a 1977 Golden Globe-winning and Oscar-nominated movie featuring Marcello Mastroianni as a persecuted radio journalist and Sophia Loren as a sentimental housewife, meeting against a backdrop of rising fascism in 1930s Italy.
He also wrote and directed We All Loved Each Other So Much, a 1974 comedy-drama about the postwar lives of three partisans fighting for the liberation of Italy. The film won the Golden prize at the ninth Moscow international film festival in 1975. The following year he won best director at the Cannes film festival for The Good, Bad and Ugly.
Scola died on Tuesday in Rome's polyclinic, where he had been in a coma since Sunday after being admitted to the hospital's cardiac surgery unit, press reports said.
The Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, paid tribute to Scola, saying he was a "master" of the screen "with an ability that was as incredible as it was razor-sharp in reading Italy, its society and the changes it went through".
On Twitter, Renzi wrote that his death "leaves a huge void in Italian culture".