MARCELLO MASTROIANNI, 72, ACCLAIMED ITALIAN FILM STAR.

Byline: Celestine Bohlen The New York Times

Marcello Mastroianni, the Italian actor whose diffident but romantic charm made him one of the movies' best-loved Latin lovers and whose keen dramatic sense made him an international star in such films as ``La Dolce Vita'' and ``8-1/2,'' died Thursday at his home in Paris. He was 72 and also had a home in Rome.

Italian news agencies reported Thursday that he had suffered from cancer of the pancreas. No cause of death was officially given.

Enzo Biagi, an Italian journalist and friend who said he last saw Mastroianni two months ago walking with a cane, added that the actor had not wanted people to know he was ill because it might prevent him from working. He continued to act until two months ago, touring Italy in a production of ``The Last Moons,'' a play about heartbreak and old age.

At the height of his career, in which he appeared in more than 120 films, Mastroianni was the exemplar of modern man facing the existential void. In Fellini's ``Dolce Vita'' and ``8-1/2'' and in Michelangelo Antonioni's bleak ``La Notte,'' he portrayed individuals searching for the keys to their lives. He was equally skilled at comedy, sometimes verging on slapstick, in films like ``Divorce, Italian Style.''

In Italy, where he was respected as one of the last giants of the golden age of Italian film but also affectionately embraced for his lighthearted, unassuming ways, Mastroianni was mourned Thursday at all levels of society - from government officials to the waiters at the restaurant in the Trastevere quarter where Mastroianni had an apartment.

The city of Rome dimmed the lights and shut off the water Thursday night at the Trevi Fountain in honor of the scene in ``La Dolce Vita'' where Mastroianni, as a young intellectual who wanders into decadent cafe society, joins Swedish actress Anita Ekberg for a midnight splash in the fountain's basin. A crowd listened silently while a musician played themes from ``8-1/2'' on a wooden flute.

Mastroianni played the leading man to a succession of beautiful women. But his most famous partnership was with Sophia Loren, who alternately married, divorced, seduced and pined after him in a total of 12 movies. Of these, the most famous were ``Marriage, Italian Style,'' ``The Priest's Wife'' and ``Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.'' Their last collaboration was in Robert Altman's 1994 movie on the fashion industry, ``Pret a Porter'' (``Ready to Wear'').

Although regarded here as the quintessential Italian actor, Mastroianni - who also spoke French and English - made many movies outside his native country with French, American and Russian directors. He won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987 for ``Dark Eyes,'' in which he played a down-at-the-heels architect whose once-glamorous life is seen in flashback. He never won an Oscar, although he was nominated several times, first for his role in Pietro Germi's ``Divorce, Italian Style'' in 1962.

``He reminds us of Fellini and of all the great things that made postwar Italian cinema, which is also dead,'' French film producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier said Thursday.

Mastroianni's relationship with Fellini, who once called the actor his alter ego, was long and strongly personal. From ``La Dolce Vita,'' they moved on to ``8-1/2'' and, in the 1980s, ``City of Women,'' ``Ginger and Fred'' and ``The Interview.''

In an interview before his death in 1993, Fellini remarked that Mastroianni's talent was not as unstudied, as natural, as he sometimes made it seem. ``The legend that Marcello is indifferent or lazy is nonsense,'' Fellini said in an interview for an article in The New York Times Magazine. ``He spends hours discussing his role until he thoroughly understands it, extracting the most extraordinary nuances. When he has it inside him, and he trusts his director, we can get what we're really after: a look at the inner reality of life.''

Mario Monicelli, who directed Mastroianni in the role of a bumbling burglar in the 1958 film ``Big Deal on Madonna Street,'' described him as ``devoid of celebrity affectations'' and ``graciously ironic.''

Italians looked somewhat cynically on his reputation as the suave Latin lover, a Hollywood-style image many felt did not correspond to his self-deprecating charm. ``On one hand there was the myth of the Latin lover, which accompanied him from his youth and his great international success,'' said a commentary carried Thursday by the Italian news agency ANSA. ``On the other, there was the man Mastroianni, who presented himself as lazy, accommodating, faithful in his way and a little bit mammone,'' the Italian word for a mama's boy.

Mastroianni generally avoided interviews, but in the few that he gave, he always seemed to question how it was that he become one of the great romantic heroes of modern cinema.

``My legs are skinny, my face has no power or resolve,'' he told journalist and author Curtis Bill Pepper in 1987, comparing himself with other leading men like Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart or Paul Newman. ``They knew where they were going - or at least, we presumed they knew. I haven't any idea. If they were heroes, then I'm a nonhero.''

Born on Sept. 28, 1924, at Fontana Liri, a small town 50 miles south of Rome, he grew up in a poor family, the son of a cabinetmaker who used to repair the holes in Marcello's shoes with pieces of aluminum. His father, who went blind from diabetes, never saw his son on the screen, although he did live to hear his voice in his first two films.

When he was still a boy, the family moved to Turin and then to Rome. He earned a degree as a surveyor in the hope of becoming an architect. But World War II intervened, and he was assigned to draw maps for Mussolini's retreating armies. Later he was drafted into digging ditches in the Alps. From there, he escaped to Venice.

When the war was over, he returned to Rome, got a job as a bookkeeper for a film company and joined a theatrical company. There he met both Fellini and actress Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife, with whom he made his stage debut. His performance drew faint praise for its ``enthusiastic inexperience.''

Mastroianni married a fellow student, Flora Carabella, in 1948. They had a daughter, Barbara, in 1950. The marriage ended after their formal separation in 1970.

He had a long romance with French actress Catherine Deneuve, with whom he had a daughter, Chiara, born in 1972. They separated a few years later but remained friends.

A funeral service is scheduled for today at St. Sulpice Church on Paris' Left Bank, after which Mastroianni's body is to be flown to Rome. There it is to lie in state in a hall on the Capitoline Hill, seat of the city government. Another memorial service is scheduled for Sunday in central Rome.

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PHOTO Marcello Mastroianni

Known for his romantic charm