Piero De Bernardi

Born April 12, 1926, the Italian screenwriter Piero De Bernardi first made his mark alongside the writer-director Gian Paolo Callegari with the 1950s B-movie adventures "Il tesoro del Bengala," "Killers of the East," and "Black Devils of Kali." While working on the script for the angst-filled romance "Le ragazze di San Frediano," De Bernardi and his fellow writer Leonardo Benvenuti formed a long-running partnership that yielded such coming-of-age dramas and comedies of amorous dalliances as "Girl with a Suitcase" and "Marriage Italian-Style," the latter of which earned Oscar nominations for Best Actress (Sophia Loren) and Best Foreign Language Film. Typically known for celebrating the female gender, the duo wrote for their first American movie star with the 1972 marriage-woes comedy "Alfredo, Alfredo," an Italian-language film that featured a dubbed performance by Dustin Hoffman. In the mid 1980s, De Bernardi and Benvenuti penned one of their most ambitious works, the violent and somber gangster saga "Once Upon a Time in America," a collaboration with the legendary director Sergio Leone that De Bernardi claims to have been over a decade in the making. Before his death in 2010, De Bernardi scripted 120 produced films (including the posthumously released war drama "So I Say") and won nearly a dozen prestigious awards.