ROME: Italian film director and master of comedy Mario Monicelli, 95, committed suicide on Monday by throwing himself out of a hospital window, the ANSA news agency reported, citing hospital sources.

Monicelli jumped from a window in the San Giovanni hospital in Rome where he was being treated for a prostate tumor, it said.

“Death doesn't frighten me, it bothers me. It bothers me for example that someone can be there tomorrow and but me I am no longer there. What bothers me is not longer being alive, not being dead,” he said in a 2007 interview with Vanity Fair.

Monicelli made his name with films such as “Amici Mei” (My Dear Friends”), considered the best of Italian-style comedies and one of his best films.

His other famous films include “Big Deal on Madonna Street” from 1958, starring Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale, and “La Granda Guerra”(The Great War”) a year later. It was this last film that won him the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival and an Oscar nomination.

Monicelli, born in 1915 in Viareggio in Tuscany, also worked in theatre and television. In all he directed some 65 films.—AFP