Dario Fo, the Italian playwright, director and performer whose scathingly satirical work earned him both praise and condemnation, as well as the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Thursday in Milan. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his Italian publisher, Chiarelettere.

Mr. Fo wrote more than 80 plays, many of them in collaboration with his wife, Franca Rame, who died in 2013, and his work was translated into dozens of languages.

He was best known for two works: “Accidental Death of an Anarchist” (1970), a play based on the case of an Italian railroad worker who was either thrown or fell from the upper story of a Milan police station while being questioned on suspicion of terrorism; and his one-man show “Mistero Buffo” (“Comic Mystery”), written in 1969 and frequently revised and updated in the decades that followed, taking wild comic aim at politics and especially religion.

After a 1977 version of “Mistero Buffo” was broadcast in Italy, the Vatican denounced it as “the most blasphemous show in the history of television.”