Born into an aristocratic family of Norman origin, Prince Alessandro Tasca di Cutò was a cousin of renowned author Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, famous for his classic novel The Leopard, which was adapted into a film by Luchino Visconti, starring Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon.
Alessandro Tasca's father, a womanizing Socialist politician known as 'The Red Prince', squandered the family's fortune in pursuit of his ideals.
Tasca emigrated to New York, where he worked a variety of jobs, including as a car mechanic, a bootlegger's driver, a cashier for the Saratoga racetrack, and a runner on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during the devastating Wall Street crash of 1929.
Following the outbreak of World War II, Alessandro returned to Rome and was assigned to the Ministry of Propaganda, where he encountered the influential Ezra Pound.
Tasca was later interned in an English-run POW camp in Southern Italy.
After the war, he was hired to facilitate Anglo-American film productions through the complexities of Italian bureaucracy.
In 1946, he met Orson Welles, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship and collaborated on numerous films, including Chimes at Midnight and Don Quixote.
Over the course of his long and distinguished career, Tasca worked with some of the most renowned names in international cinema, including John Huston, Joseph Losey, Vittorio De Sica, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Humphrey Bogart, Peter Ustinov, and Gina Lollobrigida, among many others.
His remarkable adaptability was noted by the celebrated Italian writer Luigi Barzini, who dubbed Tasca the 'bourgeois' prince in an essay on his cousin Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.
