The Nobel prizewinning playwright and actor Dario Fo, famous for his cutting political satire in plays such as The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, has died aged 90.

Fo, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1997, had been suffering from lung problems for months and had been in hospital for 12 days, the Corriere della Sera newspaper reported.

Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, sent his condolences on Thursday morning.

“In Dario Fo, Italy has lost one of the great protagonists of the theatre, of culture, of the civic life of our country,” he said. “His satire, research, his work on set design and his versatile artistic activities are the legacy of one of the world’s great Italians.”

Fo and Franca Rame – his wife, muse and leading actor – captured the hearts and minds of ordinary Italians, writing and performing for stage, radio and television, and regularly skewering political leaders with deft dialogue.

His subversive humour won him cult status, and he was seen as a hero to the left, but was also periodically hounded off stage and television in an attempt by the Italian establishment to muzzle him.

In a 1985 interview, he told Bomb magazine his aim was to create theatre “which reflects the real political situation prevailing today, by depicting the injustice and oppression of society, and by exposing the people who wield the power”.

Art, he said, had to have a “very strong relation to the facts of life”, and he sympathised with the struggles for civil rights, prisoners’ rights, the women’s movement and labour rights.

His most acclaimed work, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, was based on the real life of a Milanese railway worker, who was picked up by police in 1969, accused of terrorism and subsequently “fell” to his death out of a fourth-floor window at police headquarters. In the play, a character known as the Maniac pretends to be a high court judge investigating the death of the suspected anarchist.

Fo stirred controversy with his 1969 work Mistero Buffo, a retelling of the Christian gospels in an improvised format. It was denounced by the Vatican in 1977 as “the most blasphemous show in the history of television”.



Controversy over his work and political activism led to him being banned by the Italian state broadcaster, Rai, for 14 years. His work on behalf of Red Aid, which offered legal and other support to leftwing militants, led to clashes with the US State Department, which denied Fo visas in the early 1980s. The ban was later lifted.



Fo’s views were shaped by his experiences as young man in Milan, where he helped his father – a staunch anti-fascist who resisted the dictator Benito Mussolini – smuggle British prisoners of war and Italian Jews into Switzerland. His mother, Pina Rota, wrote a highly acclaimed book about her family called Il Paese delle Rane (The Country of Frogs).

Dario Fo and Beppe Grillo at a M5S rally in Milan in 2013. Photograph: AGF/Rex Features

Fo’s death provoked an outpouring of grief. Commentators from the media, literary, and political worlds said Italy had lost a man who created, in the words of the television presenter Pippo Baudo, “a new way of doing theatre, a new language”.

The loss was felt particularly hard among the leaders of the Five Star Movement (M5S), the populist, anti-establishment party that Fo was committed to in his later life, having compared its anarchic, foul-mouthed founder, Beppe Grillo, to one of the heroes of his own chaotic comedies.



Grillo posted a short statement about his friend and admirer on his blog, recalling a speech Fo gave to a crowd in Milan’s Piazza Duomo in 2013, in which he urged the party’s followers to “go do it yourselves!”

In an interview with the Observer that year, Fo said the last time he had seen the piazza filled with the same joy was at the end of the second world war, when people were “changing their way of thinking about politics”.

In August, Fo auctioned off an artwork he had painted to help raise money for the M5S. It depicted Maria Elena Boschi, a reformist minister in Renzi’s government who brought in sweeping changes to Italy’s electoral system and constitution that have been staunchly opposed by the M5S.



“You will always be with us, Dario,” Grillo wrote on Thursday.



Not everyone recalled Fo so fondly. The writer had high-profile clashes with the government of Silvio Berlusconi and was sued by an associate of the former conservative prime minister in 2004 for poking fun at Berlusconi’s size.



After news of his death emerged, Renato Brunetta, a politician in the Forza Italia party and a minister under Berlusconi, said he could not be hypocritical and admitted he never liked the writer. “With me he used racist terms in reference to my height. God rest his soul,” Brunetta tweeted.



Matteo Salvini, the leader of the rightwing and xenophobic Northern League, said Fo clearly believed that he and his Northern League followers were racist, egotistical and ignorant. “It’s all right, it’s water under the bridge. I’m not resentful,” he said, before offering up “double prayers”.

Another writer and political activist, Erri de Luca, said Fo was the happiest winner of the Nobel prize for literature that ever lived. “Instead of a tear we must smile.”