The former prime minister of Italy reveled in the spotlight, even when it shined on him for causing offense.
Flamboyant, freewheeling, slippery and preening, Silvio Berlusconi loomed over Italian politics for decades as billionaire businessman, media tycoon and prime minister.
Mr. Berlusconi, who died on Monday at 86, reveled in the spotlight, flattering or not, and often shined it on himself.Cruise ship singer to television tycoon
Mr. Berlusconi, born in Milan to a bank clerk and a homemaker in 1936, studied law as a young man but soon gravitated toward more performative ventures. He sang on cruise liners and in nightclubs, and convinced the owner of the small bank where his father worked to back him in a real estate project.
A residential development and other lucrative businesses led to ownership of a television station that, by the 1980s, formed the basis of a media empire. His television stations modernized the industry in Italy, and built him a fortune.
In the early 1990s, though, as his political allies lost power and the authorities cracked down on corruption, regulation seemed likely to break up his business empire. So Mr. Berlusconi founded a political party, Forza Italia — or Go Italy, after a soccer cheer — backed by the media-honed thinking of Mr. Berlusconi, who told his candidates for Parliament not to have bad breath or sweaty palms.
“I’m like Prince Charming,” he once said. “They were pumpkins, and I turned them into parliamentarians.”Finding a path as a political boss
Mr. Berlusconi put himself front and center of his new party, announcing a run for office in 1994 with a video message that he aired on his three national television networks.
“Italy is the country I love,” he began, sitting at a desk in his 18th-century villa. “Here I have my roots, my hopes, my horizons. Here, I learned from my father my job as a businessman.”
He promised prosperity and change with the vim of a lifelong salesman — saying Italians could be rich like him — and after a two-month campaign his party won strong support. But he lasted only seven months as prime minister before his coalition government fell apart, a twist that Mr. Berlusconi, then 57, turned into an opportunity. Through the rest of the 1990s, he became a vocal opposition figure.
