'Last Tango In Paris' Director Bernardo Bertolucci Dead at 77

Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, who won Oscars with "The Last Emperor" and whose erotic drama "Last Tango in Paris" enthralled and shocked the world, died Monday. He was 77.

Bertolucci's press office, Punto e Virgola, confirmed the death in an email to The Associated Press. Italy's state-run RAI said Bertolucci died at his home in Rome, surrounded by family.

Bertolucci's movies often explored the sexual relations among characters stuck in a psychological crisis, as in "Last Tango." The self-professed Marxist also did not shy away from politics and ideology, as in "The Conformist," which some critics consider Bertolucci's masterpiece.

Despite working with A-list American and international stars, Bertolucci always defended his own film-making style against what he said was the pressure of the U.S. film industry. He maintained critical success for most of his career, weathering the controversies that his sexually provocative work would stir and some commercial flops.

"When it comes to commercial cinema, I have the strange pleasure of feeling that I'm from another tribe, an infiltrator," he told Italian daily Corriere della Sera in 1990.

He was honored for lifetime achievement at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011.

Bertolucci's movies also bore the imprint of the director's own experiences in psychoanalysis. He always said that making films was his way of communicating with the audience. It was his personal language.

"Maybe I'm an idealist, but I still think of the movie theater as a cathedral where we all go together to dream the dream together," he said upon receiving an award from the Director's Guild of America for his 1987 film "The Last Emperor."

That movie handed Bertolucci his greatest success. In 1988 it won all nine Academy Awards that it had been nominated for, including Best Picture and Best Director.

The movie, the first Western feature film to win permission to shoot in Beijing's Forbidden City, follows the life of China's last emperor, from child-king at the end of the Qing Dynasty to war criminal and finally to an ordinary citizen in the People's Republic.

It was filmed in the lush and vivid style that was one of Bertolucci's trademarks. It featured grandiose scenes and intimate moments, and a flashback structure that is typical of biopics.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.