After graduating from Accademia Nazionale di Arte Drammatica Silvio D'Amico in 1951, Wertmüller produced avant-garde plays, traveling throughout Europe and working as a puppeteer, stage manager, set designer, publicist, and scriptwriter for radio and television.

It was during this time she saw critical and international success, gaining traction as a filmmaker outside of Italy and in the United States on a scale that many of her contemporaries were unable to attain.

In 1975, the National Board of Review in the United States awarded Swept Away Top Foreign Film, and in 1976, Wertmüller became the first female director to be nominated for an Oscar, for Seven Beauties.

This film, which again features Giannini in the lead role, pushes Wertmüller's specific brand of tragic comedy to its limits, following a self-obsessed Casanova from a small Italian town who is sent to a German concentration camp.

The film initially met with controversy due to Wertmüller's frankness in her rendering of the apparatuses of genocide as well as her perceived macabre insensitivity toward its survivors,[citation needed] but since has been accepted as her masterwork.

[26] In the same year, Wertmüller had another unsuccessful film Blood Feud, a mafia thriller starring Giannini, Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren.

[30] They are survived by their daughter Maria Zulima (born 17 January 1991) who was an actress is a few of Wertmüller's films, including The Blue Collar Worker and the Hairdresser in a Whirl of Sex and Politics (1996), Ferdinando and Carolina (1999), Too Much Romance...

They share empathy with the Italian working class, showing the realities of life for the politically neglected and economically downtrodden, with a tendency toward the preposterous.

[35] Her aesthetic borrows heavily from her background in theater, routinely using the camera to emphasize performance and the grandiose comedy of her characters’ near constant emotional frenzy.

[22] Narrative and cinematic reflexivity are also commonplace in Wertmüller's films, as she rehashed and reconfigured signs and modes of presentation in a way that references her inspirations and her contemporaries.

This element of critique in the film functions as one example of one of the most prevalent themes in Wertmüller's work, a desire to deconstruct and subvert the institutions and social ideologies of a capitalist modernity.

Most of her films deploy these elements in conjunction with her affection for the theatrical in such a way that creates a unique concoction that is undeniably within the generic confines of Commedia all’italiana.

[citation needed] According to Peter Bondanella, "Wertmüller's work combined a concern with topical political issues and the conventions of traditional Italian grotesque comedy".