Michelangelo Antonioni was born in 1912 into a middle-class family and grew up in bourgeois surroundings of the Italian province. In Bologna he studied economics and commerce while he painted and also wrote criticism for a local newspaper. In 1939 he went to Rome and worked for the journal "Cinema" studying directorship at the School of Cinema. As he was indebted to neorealism his films reflect his bourgeois roots like in his first movie Chronique d'un amour (1950) or La dame sans camélia (1953) or Femmes entre elles (1955). His biggest success was the trilogy L'Avventura (1960), La nuit (1961), and L'éclipse (1962), with which he won several prizes. This success allowed him to go abroad and to work on international scale in English: e.g. Blow Up (1966) in London and Zabriskie Point (1970) in the USA as well as Profession: reporter (1975). A stroke in 1985 severely inhibited his productivity until his death in 2007.
