‘Postman’ Star Chose Film Instead of Heart Transplant

Massimo Troisi was such a popular comic actor in his native Italy that he could barely walk down a street in Rome without getting mobbed. Still, he wanted fame well beyond his country’s shores.

“The Postman” (Il Postino), in which he stars, cost $3 million to make and has so far made $13 million in Italy, where it has been in theaters since October. It was picked up by Miramax after drawing raves at the Toronto Film Festival, and opens today on 100 screens nationwide.

But Troisi won’t reap the spoils of “Postman’s” success. His heart, weakened by a lifetime of illness, gave out just 12 hours after the film had finished shooting. He was 41.

Troisi first proposed the project to his friend, director Michael Radford, who is the first Englishman to direct an Italian-language movie. Radford is pleased and mildly shocked by the enthusiasm surrounding “Postman” so far.

“People seem to like it on different levels,” Radford says during an interview in a Manhattan hotel. “The intellectuals like it because it’s about poetry. And my sister’s boyfriend whose sole intake is ‘Die Hard 3’ and a can of beer absolutely loved it, even though he’d never seen a subtitled movie before.”

Troisi, who started out working in TV comedy, also was a writer and director who made, with fellow comedy star Roberto Benigni, “Non Ci Reste Che Plangere” (1985). The following year, Benigni’s fame had gone international with his spectacular turn in Jim Jarmusch’s “Down by Law.”

“Massimo was jealous of Benigni,” Radford says. “Not of his talent, but of his recognition, his fame. Massimo was very much the equal of Benigni in Italy, but was ambitious enough to believe that he could get the same degree of success if he could find the right vehicle.”

Troisi believed he had found that vehicle in “Burning Patience,” a novel by Chilean author Antonio Skameta about a mailman who befriends Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in the latter’s twilight years. He brought the novel to Radford, whose first concern was whether the book could be changed to an Italian setting. “By chance or luck,” Radford says, “we’d discovered Neruda had been on the Isle of Capri in 1952 in exile.”

As Radford and Troisi worked on the script in Los Angeles, the director noticed that his star “seemed to have slowed down, but not dramatically.” Radford had known that Troisi had been plagued by heart trouble since a childhood bout with rheumatic fever and had, in his 20s, undergone bypass surgery.

“We finished work in L.A., and he told me he had to go to Houston for a checkup, but that he’d see me in three or four days in Rome,” Radford recalls. “When he came back, all he told me was that he’d undergone surgery there. And he was not the same guy I’d left in Los Angeles.”

Radford later learned that a Houston cardiologist, upon performing surgery on Troisi, found the actor in dire need of a heart transplant. Troisi refused.

“We didn’t know any of this when we started shooting,” Radford recalls. “So we went ahead and after the first week, Massimo collapsed.”

Having found out about the seriousness of Troisi’s condition, Radford urged Troisi to stop and “sort yourself out.” Again, the actor refused. “ ‘I’ve got to finish this picture, no matter what,’ he told me.”

Just how to make it without straining Troisi’s weak heart proved to be Radford’s biggest challenge. Stand-ins were used in scenes like those in which the postman rides his bicycle to Neruda’s hilltop villa. “I used over-the-shoulder shots 80% of the time,” says Radford, who managed to coax many of the film’s more resonant, evocative scenes through tight close-ups of Troisi’s face.

Radford remembers collecting a series of these shots just before his last conversation with Troisi.

“I was grabbing anything, any little bit I could. Just after wrapping it up, he went into his caravan for just a little while. When he came back out, he was as white as a sheet. He was so ill. He grasped me and we embraced. Everyone was watching, the cast, the crew. He said to me, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t give you everything. For the next five movies we do, I promise I’ll give you more.’ I just burst into tears. I couldn’t take it.”

What would Troisi think of the fuss being made over his performance? “Well, for one thing, he would hate people going to this movie for the sake of morbid curiosity,” Radford says. “He often told me he wanted to make this movie to ‘make our sons proud of us.’ And also, he wanted to make people laugh and make people cry. Just as he’d done since he was a teen-ager.”