Trivia

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of this actor, his most important biography has been published: Memo Benassi. Un grande attore diversa by Leonardo Bragaglia , published by Persiani.

In 1954 Roberto Rossellini called him to play Frère Dominique in Arthur Honegger 's Joan of Arc at the Stake, alongside Ingrid Bergman, at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.

He played the composer Beethoven in the 1942 film Rossini.

His native village, Sorbolo , in whose cemetery he rests, has named a street after him.

He was enrolled in several major theater companies of the time, notably working with Eleonora Duse and Emma and Irma Gramatica.

A fickle and tormented personality, inconsistent in his acting performance, Benassi was the living testimony of the crisis of a theater and of an era of transition.

He died in Bologna in 1957, at the age of sixty-five, victim of a cerebral hemorrhage, shortly after having recorded Chekhov's Swan Song for Rai.

He made his film debut in 1932, and had main roles in films by Alessandro Blasetti and Max Ophüls, among others.

His first big break came in 1921 when he joined Eleonora Duse 's company, alongside whom he performed, among other things, Henrik Ibsen 's Ghosts (in the role of Oswald). He would remain alongside the famous actress until her last tour in Pittsburgh in 1924.

Benassi initially formed as a musician, studying cello at the Parma Conservatory.

Memo Benassi was an Italian stage and film actor who appeared in more than forty films in a mixture of leading and supporting roles.

His professional acting career was launched in the late 1910s by Gualtiero Tumiati, who offered him a role in his stage company after noting him during an amateur theatrical performance.

After the war, he mostly focused on his theatrical career, working with Giorgio Strehler and Luchino Visconti.

In 1925, he formed his own stage company.

A copy of the Mask of Memo Benassi, a work by the sculptor Luigi Froni , has been placed in the atrium of Sorbolo's civic centre.