One of the most respected and prolific Italian screenwriters, Ennio De Concini, who has died aged 84, won an Oscar in 1963 for his share of the original screenplay of Divorce, Italian Style. He collaborated on the scripts of more than 150 films over half a century but was a maverick who enjoyed working in different genres.
De Concini's credits range from neo-realist social dramas to comedies by directors such as Mario Monicelli or Dino Risi, early works by future cult directors such as the horror specialist Mario Bava or the pre-western costume spectaculars of Sergio Leone. He worked with Antonio Margheriti, Riccardo Freda and Raffaello Matarazzo and collaborated on scripts by auteurs such as Michelangelo Antonioni (Il Grido, The Cry) and Franco Brusati (Il Suo Modo di Fare, Tenderly), as well as early works by some of the new generation of directors, including Florestano Vancini, Francesco Maselli, Peter Del Monte and Marco Bellocchio.
Born in Rome, as a young man De Concini took part in the anti-fascist resistance, where he met Monicelli. After the war, Monicelli would come to his aid when he was penniless and unable to find anyone to stage his plays. Monicelli introduced him to Cesare Zavattini, who in 1946 got him a job on Vittorio De Sica's Sciuscià (Shoeshine) as an assistant. He collaborated without credit on many other films, particularly at the beginning of his career, but also in later years when he doctored scripts for producers such as Dino De Laurentiis, when tax reasons made it expedient to do so.
He worked on the first script of King Vidor's War and Peace (1956), but the director with whom he could claim most affinity was Pietro Germi, with whom he first worked closely on Il Ferroviere (The Railway Man, 1956), in which he persuaded the director to play the leading role himself.
In Un Maledetto Imbroglio (That Ugly Mess, 1959) - adapted from the modern Italian classic in Roman dialect (Quer Pasticciaccio Bruto di Via Merulana) by Carlo Emilio Gadda - he had succeeded in overcoming the writer's reticence to have his novel filmed. And it was Germi with whom in 1961 he and Alfredo Giannetti would share the credit for the script of Divorce, Italian Style, which won them that Oscar and launched the international fame of Marcello Mastroianni. When I met De Concini some years later, he pointed out to me with a coy smile his Oscaretto (little Oscar) on a shelf, one of many awards.
I interviewed him in the early 1970s about one of three films he also directed, Hitler: The Last 10 Days, in which Alec Guinness gave a prodigious performance as the Führer. He was very impressed by the British actor's professionalism, commenting: "He knew the whole script by heart three weeks before we began shooting. He received threatening letters, presumably from neo-fascists, during the shooting, and though he shrugged them off, the producer had to increase the insurance on his life. He would always stay around to give cues from behind camera. I think he was very glad to cut off Hitler's moustache which he had grown for the film." Though the film won some respectable reviews - particularly appreciated was the final touch when, after Hitler and Eva Braun are dead, his courtiers, who were banned from smoking, light up their cigarettes and cigars - De Concini did not proceed with this second career.
He had begun directing in 1952 when, in his early years as a scriptwriter, he had co-directed a semi-documentary about Italian soccer called Gli Undici Moschettieri (The Eleven Musketeers). This was not followed up until 20 years later, when he directed Daniele e Maria, in which Peter Firth played a youth with learning difficulties who can only find comfort from the daughter of the family's housemaid. I asked him if he was interested in directing. "Not really," he admitted. "Normally, when I've finished writing or collaborating on a script, I don't take further interest in it." In 1960, he was credited on the scripts of 11 films.
In his later years he did a lot of television work and wrote some of the first episodes of the popular Italian TV series La Piovra (The Octopus). In creating a romantic hero out of a policeman chasing down the mafia, he returned to the mood of the first cinema feature that he scripted alone, in 1950, Il Brigante Musolino (Outlaw Girl), in which, for director Mario Camerini, he had romanticised the story of a bandit.
De Concini was a diligent and unpretentious professional who enjoyed changing genre, writing poetry and short stories too. He was a man of charm with an amiable disposition towards friends and colleagues, who would often call on him for advice and conviviality at his home - first, in a cramped pied-à-terre studio in a busy district of Rome, and later, in a quieter place in the suburbs where he was looked after by his wife, Ninni, and son, Claudio, who survive him.
• Ennio De Concini, screenwriter and director, born December 6 1923; died November 17 2008
