Troisi came to international fame through the success of Il Postino, directed by Michael Radford. Troisi died in 1994 of a heart attack in his sister's house in Ostia (Rome) twelve hours after the main filming on Il Postino had finished. It was reported that he postponed surgery to complete the film.
He was posthumously nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role. He is one of only seven actors to be posthumously nominated for an acting Academy Award. (The others are Jeanne Eagels, James Dean, Spencer Tracy, Peter Finch, Sir Ralph Richardson, and Heath Ledger.)
A good friend of the musician and singer Pino Daniele (who wrote most of the soundtracks for his movies), he wrote lyrics for his music or adapted his poetry for it. Eduardo De Filippo, father of Neapolitan theatre of the 20th century, said of him that he was a comic actor of the future, but with his roots in the past.
Read more about this topic: Massimo Troisi