"Vittorio Gassman (September 1, 1922 – June 29, 2000), popularly known as Il Mattatore, was an Italian theatre and film actor and director. Gassman is considered one among the best Italian actors and is commonly recalled as an extremely professional, versatile, magnetic interpreter, whose long career includes both important productions as well as dozens of divertissements (which gave him a vast popularity).He was born in Genoa to a father from a wealthy family of German origins and a Pisan mother.

While very young he moved to Rome, where he attended the studies at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica where some of the most important figures of Italian theatre and cinema also studied, such as Paolo Stoppa, Rina Morelli, Adolfo Celi, Luigi Squarzina, Elio Pandolfi, Rossella Falk, Lea Padovani and, later, with Paolo Panelli, Nino Manfredi, Tino Buazzelli, Gianrico Tedeschi, Monica Vitti, Luca Ronconi and many others.

His debut was in Milan, in 1942, with Alda Borelli in Niccodemi's Nemica (theatre), he then moved to Rome and the Teatro Eliseo joining Tino Carraro and Ernesto Calindri in a team that remained famous; with them he acted in a range of plays from bourgeois comedy to the sophisticated intellectual theatre, with no apparent difficulty in the sudden changes.

In 1946 he made his film debut in Preludio d'amore, the year after he appeared in five films. In 1948 his famous interpretation in Riso Amaro displayed his love for cinema and his capability of excelling both in movies and at the theatre. It was with Luchino Visconti's company that Gassman achieved his mature successes, together with Stoppa, Rina Morelli and Paola Borboni. He played a vigorous Kowalski in Tennessee Williams' Un tram che si chiama desiderio, then emphatic in Shakespeare's Rosalinda or in Vittorio Alfieri's Oreste. He then joined the Teatro Nazionale with Tommaso Salvini, Massimo Girotti, Arnoldo Foà, for a successful Peer Gynt (Ibsen).

With Luigi Squarzina in 1952 he co-founded and co-directed the Teatro d'Arte Italiano, producing the first complete version of Hamlet in Italy, then rare works such as Seneca's Tieste or Eschilo's The Persians.

In cinema he worked frequently both in Italy and abroad. With his natural charisma and his fluency in English he scored a number of roles in Hollywood; it was during an early stint there that he met and married Shelley Winters, whom he divorced to return to Italy.