Italian sues Fanny Ardant for praising guerrilla

The son of a former Italian policeman killed by the Red Brigades said on Tuesday he was suing actress Fanny Ardant, who is due to attend this week's Venice film festival, for calling the founder of the guerrilla group her "hero."

Piero Mazzola told Reuters he had filed suit against the French actress on grounds that she had praised a murderer. In Italy it is illegal to praise someone for committing a crime.

The 58-year-old star sparked an angry response in Italy last week when she told an Italian magazine she admired jailed guerrilla Renato Curcio because, unlike leaders of the 1968 Paris student revolt, he did not abandon leftist ideals.

"For me Renato Curcio is a hero. I always considered the Red Brigades phenomenon to be very moving and passionate," she told the magazine "A" in an interview, adding that Curcio "didn't become a businessman" like French leftists of his generation.

Conservative politicians in Italy called for Ardant, former partner of director Francois Truffaut, to stay away from the film festival, which opens on Wednesday and where her latest film is premiering.

Ardant has since offered a contrite apology in an interview with Italian state television, saying she was sorry to have "caused suffering to people who have already suffered."

But Mazzola, a lawyer whose father was gunned down with a colleague near Venice in 1974 -- one of the Red Brigades' first victims -- said her apologies were not enough.

"Curcio was convicted for the killing my father, among other crimes. So, together with my family, I have filed legal proceedings against Ardant because she is praising a murderer," Mazzola said.

"I just can't see how killing people can be called heroism," he said. "She may see the Red Brigades as passionate while sipping champagne in Paris, but for us it's very different."

TRIP TO VENICE CANCELLED?

Italian media said Ardant was thinking of cancelling her trip to Venice out of fear that the controversy would overshadow the release of "L'Ora di Punta," by Italian director Vincenzo Marra, whose premiere is scheduled for September 6.

"Let her come to Venice and realize that not so long ago this land was soaking with blood. And I don't mean the tomato sauce they use in movies, I mean real blood," Mazzola said.

Marco Mueller, the director of the festival, said it was up to Ardant to decide whether to come.

"We are obviously ready to welcome her, but that does not mean that we agree with her views about some of the most tragic events of our recent past," Mueller told Reuters.

Curcio was a founder of the Marxist urban guerrilla group and was jailed for a series of killings and kidnappings starting in 1970 that became known as the "years of lead."

The band's most notorious act was the kidnap and murder of Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro in 1978.