Considered by many in the theater to be the most influential director of the second half of the twentieth century, Giorgio Strehler’s death leaves a void not only in Italian theater, in which he loomed as a protean force, but also in the world of theater as a whole. Jack Lang, the former French Minister of Culture and close friend who had taken over the Piccolo Teatro, spoke of a "loss of a brother and friend in the battle for popular art". He died of a heart attack on Christmas Day, 1997, a day said by his friends to be his favorite day. In fact he had just finished decorating a small tree.
     Giorgio Strehler was born in Barcola (province of Trieste) August 15, 1921. He was the only child of a famous violinist mother who had also played under the baton o conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. He was left fatherless at the age of three. His father was Austrian, and his mother was half French and half Slovenian. The language at home was Italian, but French, German, and Slovenian were also spoken. Giorgio grew up speaking Italian, but spoke French well and his German was passable.
     His grandfather, Olimpio Lovric, was his father figure. He was one of the finest horn players of his day, but then owned a movie theater and became the impresario of the Teatro Verdi, Trieste’s Opera House.
     Strehler remembers seeing a performance of Boito’s Mefistofele at the Teatro Verdi and nothing else. He was not impressed with theater as a whole. He thought theater, both operatic and spoken, was false, and it could not stir your feelings like the cinema could. Thus he preferred to see movies at one of the houses owned by his grandfather. He vividly remembered seeing "The Gold Rush" and "Rin-Tin-Tin". These movies became his mythology.
     When his grandfather died Giorgio, now seven or eight, moved to Milan with his mother and grandmother who had left her husband to go live in Milan with another man. Milan was to become Strehler’s home till the end of his life. One hot summer night while on his way to the cinema he noticed the sign "Air-Conditioned" posted by the theater Odeon. He walked in for some relief from the weather to see a performance of Goldoni’s "Una delle ultime sere di Carnovale" being given by a company from Venice. He was very much taken with the third act. He went every evening for the next few days to see more plays by Goldoni about whom he new nothing at that time. His theater attendance became almost maniacal that he became part of a claque in order to gain free admission to the Milan theaters.
     He applied and was accepted to the theater school, Accademia dei Filodrammatici, and the last year of his liceo classico (last year before exams for university admission) he played hooky to attend the theater school instead unbeknownst to his mother. He won all the prizes at the theater and eventually made up his school work with the help of private tutors.
     It was at the Accademia that he met his lifelong friend Paolo Grassi with whom he was to found the Piccolo Teatro. In the meantime war broke out and he went in exile in Switzerland. With Geneva’s Compagnie des Masques he directed the world premiere of Albert Camus’ Caligula. After the war he became theater critic for Milano Sera, but he preferred making theater rather than writing about it. It was at this time that he started the Piccolo Teatro di Milano with Grassi and the support of Milan’s mayor Antonio Greppi. It opened May 17, 1947 in the auditorium of the Broletto cinema with Maxim Gorki’s Lower Depths. Few days later they gave Goldoni’s long forgotten "Arlecchino Servant of Two masters" which would go on to become the longest running play in Italian theater. In that same year he also directs La Traviata at La Scala; the first of many opera productions he would direct.
     In the early year he would put on up to twelve new production per season. Some of the authors whose work he produced were Eliot, Buzzati, Pirandello, Ibsen, Flaiano, and Calderón. He put on theater which was culturally relevant. His and Grassi’s idea of theater was not to "pay an abstract homage to culture." Or ‘to offer a mere distraction... passive contemplation", theater was "a place where people gather to hear statements that they can accept or reject". And these statements Strehler presented them well enough that people kept coming back.
     In the 50’s he gave several plays by Bertolt Brecht with whom he would became a close friend sharing his political beliefs. In 1956 Brecht attended a production of his "Threepenny Opera". Back in Berlin he wrote back "..thank you for the excellent performance of my Threepenny Opera which you have realized with a great director. Fire and freshness, ease and precision distinguish this performance from many others I have seen....it would be a joy and an honor for me if your theater could perform ...at the Berliner Ensemble’s Theater ...which witnessed the first performance of this work".
     His love for Shakespeare (Coriolanus, The Tempest, King Lear, Twelfth Night, Macbeth), Pirandello (Henry IV), and Chekov (The Cherry Orchard, Platonov) was unmistakable; but he always returned to Goldoni repeating the same plays decades later.
     Strehler created the role of theater director (regista was actually coined in 1929) in Italy all by himself. Until he came plays were for the most part still put on by traveling companies that were a microcosm unto themselves. They directed themselves. They had never heard of a director. He also gave prominence to Italian authors, though few in number. Strehler used to say that "Italian theater has produced few important dramatic authors - Machiavelli, Goldoni, Pirandello- but an enormous number of actors. Between 1500 and 1700, every self-respecting court in Europe had to have a company of Italian actors".
     He originally had not intended to become an actor. He enrolled in fact in the law school at the University of Milan planning to become a criminal lawyer. He said "a profession as I imagined it was very close to the theater". But then war came and it changed everything.
     He has influenced three generations of actors and inspired many around the world. His influence in the English speaking world is less felt. As he spoke little English and did not direct many plays in this language. However he was given the Legion d’Honneur by the French government and was named director of the "Theater of Europe" in Paris in 1985. The first Pan-European theater project.
     Luigi Scalfaro, the Italian president said his death ‘deprives Italy and the world of a great human and artistic figure, a keen interpreter of modern culture, socially sensitive and fascinating esthetically". Paolo Villaggio, who was playing Molière’s "The Miser" under his direction stated " Giorgio has been and still is theater in Italy". Vittorio Gassman hailed him as "the greatest director along with Luchino Visconti", and for Riccardo Muti, music director of La Scala, "there is an immense void in theater and in our culture. I will always be in his debt for the artistic experience that we lived through together as he questioned us on Mozart and Verdi". Finally Carla Fracci, Prima Ballerina, and her husband Beppe Menegatti in an open letter said it best: "The million lights have gone out that you, maestro, lit up over the many years to give us joy in the night of a deserted theater. It is gospel truth that theater, as life itself, is only a desert without a true maestro".