The widow of the film director Michelangelo Antonioni has disclosed that he starved himself to death because he could not face going blind.

Antonioni, director of "Blow-Up", "L'Avventura" and "The Passenger", died last July at the age of 94. He had long been in decline after a stroke in 1985 which left him partly paralysed and rendered him frail and speechless, but he continued to direct and paint.

However, Enrica Fico, his widow, said that he had become so distressed by his gradual loss of sight and the fact that he was "no longer master of his own body" that he had expressed a wish to die. "Every day he said to me, kill me, bang, take a pistol and shoot me," she said.

She said they had "even looked into the hypothesis of using poison, but not seriously, only because of his usual curiosity". She said she did not believe he would have taken his life by shooting or poison "because I still represented his link with the world. But certainly he asked for help. To die was his only wish. To go away, in order not to fall into darkness and live as a blind man".

Ms Fico, who married Antonioni the year after his stroke, said that instead of more drastic means he had "simply stopped eating”, with "incredible willpower". He had eaten little or nothing from September 2006, just over a year before he died, she told La Stampa. "He came to table with me, to keep me company, but only ate a few spoonfuls". He had proved that "one's body continues to live even if you go month after month without eating".

She said that like the mystics who had similarly starved themselves, Antonioni had acquired "extraordinary mental lucidity" towards the end. He had put up with his decline and illness "gloriously", but "not to be able to see was for him truly unacceptable".

He had wanted to die "to free himself not so much from pain as from the body which was the origin of his suffering." She said his death "was a masterpiece as much as his cinematic works. He went in absolute peace, embracing the absolute, as if he were a mystic. He wanted to de-materialise".

Antonioni, who died on the same day as the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, came to international fame in 1960 with L'Avventura, followed by La Notte (1961) and L'Eclisse (1962). The films, all starring Monica Vitti, together form a trilogy dealing with the alienation of man in the modern world. His first colour film, Il Deserto Rosso (The Red Desert) in 1964 had a similar theme

His first English language film was the box office hit Blow-Up (1966), starring David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave, followed by Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Passenger (1975), the latter starring Jack Nicholson.

After his stroke he continued to make films, including Beyond the Clouds (1995), made in collaboration with Wim Wenders. His final film was a segment called "The Dangerous Thread of Things" for the film "Eros", compiled by several different directors in 2004. He is buried in Ferrara, where he was born.

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