Alessandro Tasca(1906-2000)

Born Prince Alessandro Tasca di Cutò into an aristocratic family of Norman origin, cousin of the author Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of the classic novel The Leopard, adapted into a film by Luchino Visconti, starring Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon. Alessandro Tasca's father, a womanizing Socialist politician known as 'The Red Prince', devoured the family's fortune to realize his ideals. Tasca emigrated to New York and worked as a car mechanic, a bootlegger's driver, a cashier for the Saratoga racetrack and a runner on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during the Wall Street crash of 1929. After the outbreak of WW2, Alessandro returned to Rome and was assigned to the Ministry of Propaganda where he met Ezra Pound. Alessandro was later interned in an English-run POW camp in Southern Italy. After the war Tasca, was hired to work in the film industry to ease Anglo-American productions through the horrors of Italian bureaucracy. In 1946 he met Orson Welles who was to become a lifelong friend. Over the next forty years he worked on several of Welles' films both in Europe and later on in America, among others Chimes at Midnight and Don Quixote. Tasca also worked with some of the great names of international cinema over his long career: John Huston, Joseph Losey, Vittorio De Sica, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Humphrey Bogart, Peter Ustinov, Gina Lollobrigida, and many others. Tasca's singular adaptability was observed by the distinguished Italian writer, Luigi Barzini of The Italians fame, who dubbed Tasca the 'bourgeois' prince in an essay on his cousin Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.