Short answers, pulled from the story.
The alienation trilogy consists of L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'Eclisse (1962). Il deserto rosso (1964), Antonioni's first color film, is sometimes counted as a fourth entry in the sequence. All four films starred Monica Vitti.
Antonioni is the first and one of only two directors to have won all four major European festival prizes: the Palme d'Or, the Golden Lion, the Golden Bear, and the Golden Leopard. He also received an Honorary Academy Award in 1994, presented by Jack Nicholson, recognizing his place as one of cinema's master visual stylists.
Antonioni's 1985 stroke left him aphasic and partly paralyzed, unable to speak or write. Despite this, he continued directing, including Beyond the Clouds (1995) and a segment for the anthology film Eros (2004), completing work into his nineties.
Blowup (1966) is set in Swinging London and stars David Hemmings as a fashion photographer. It was loosely based on a short story by the Argentine-French writer Julio Cortázar. The film won the Palme d'Or at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival and earned Antonioni Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.
Stanley Kubrick listed La Notte among his ten favourite films in a 1963 poll. Andrei Tarkovsky drew heavily on Antonioni's influence when developing Nostalghia. Jean-Luc Godard stated in a 2004 interview that Antonioni was the filmmaker who had most influenced contemporary cinema.
Antonioni was born on the 29th of September 1912 in Ferrara, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. He died in Rome on the 30th of July 2007, aged 94, the same day as Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. He was buried in Ferrara on the 2nd of August 2007.