The Wild Eye

Just found a Robert Woods interview I hadn’t read before on a website called www.glasshousepresents.com

Tiberio Murgia has died.  Here’s a rough translation of an article that appeared on an Italian website: Tiberio Murgia, who died at the age of 81 after several months of illness in a nursing home in Tolfa,  was one of the most famous faces in Italian cinema. But, even now, after 155 films and a [...]

Edith Peters was one of the many black performers who complemented their careers in the popular nightclubs and revues of the time with the occassional bit part roles on screen.

I’d never seen this before, but Ottaviano Dell’Acqua, aka Richard Raymond, one of the famous Dell’Acqua family of cinecitta stuntmen and a fixture of 80s Italian horror films, has his own website.

Someone who has always intrigued me is Gloria Paul, an English actress who ended up acting in films in Italy during the 60s. I associate her primarily with comedies and spy films, a glamorous, exotic lady who wouldn’t fit in so well with the more grimy productions made during the 70s.

Fernando Piazza was one of the more obscure black actors to ply their trade in Cinecitta in the 60s. His first credited performance, as far as I can make out, was in Domenico Paolella’s entertaining historical adventure The Women of Devil’s Island

I’m a bit late in posting this one, but Massimo Sarchielli died on the 12th May. Sarchielli was a busy actor who appeared in both Italian and international films from the 1960s onwards.  He was in several spaghetti westerns (such as the superior Requiescant and Bandidos (both 67)), a number of arthouse favourites (Giulietta degli [...]

James Sampson was a familiar face in Italian exploitation films of the 1980s. He never had big roles, being more the kind of actor who would pop up for thirty seconds before dropping out of the picture…

Alex Nicol was born in 1916 in New York. A prolific stage actor of the 1930s, where he was part of Maurice Evans’s Shakesperean company, he later spent time studying under Lee Strasberg, served as a Sergeant in the war and had some success on Broadway in the 1950s. His film career also kicked off [...]

Here’s an obscure performer who, I’d guess, must be an American: the marvellously named Jim Granite!

Who was he? Well, as far as I can tell he only appeared in one film, Carlo Lizzani’s Il gobbo (1960). He plays a young American soldier who comes to the assistance of Anna Maria Ferrero, only to be chased off by Pier Paolo Pasolini (who plays an angry, one armed, ex-partisan). He has a total of about two minutes of screentime, but it’s not an unimportant role and he has a good few lines of dialogue (spoken in English).

Although an obscure figure to the rest of the world, actress Nicoletta Rizzi was well known within Italy, primarily because of her winning performance as a beautiful and mysterious alien in the 1972 TV series A come Andromeda

Just heard that the great Spanish comedy actor Jose Lui Lopez Vazquez died on November 2nd.  Here’s an obituary from EInsiders.com: José Luis López Vázquez de la Torre, March 11, 1922 – Nov. 2, 2009, popular Spanish actor who often worked with director Antonio Mercero, has died. He was 87. Vázquez and Mercero , together [...]

The chaps at Nocturno have posted up an interview with actor Tony Norton (aka Antonio Monselesan) on their revamped and rather good new website.  Norton appeared in several films during the early seveties, including both of the George Hilton Dick Luft comedies (he played the hapless ‘Tricky Dicky’) and Mario Gariazzo’s excellent crime film The [...]

More sad news, Rosanna Schiaffino died on the 17th October after a long battle with breast cancer.  She was one of the best known Italian actresses of the late 50s and sixties, a Genoan who moved into cinema after winning local beauty contests and was soon making an impact in films like La sfida (58).  [...]

This blog in danger of becoming an obituary listing at the moment. Anyway, Giovanni Elsner isn’t possibly that familiar a name to Italian film fans internationally, but he was an actor and radio host who was born on Septermber 27th, 1940 and died, after a long illness, on the 5th October. Born in South Tyrol,he [...]

Sad news – Jose Martinez Martinez, aka Daniel Martin, died on September the 28th at his home, Las Truchas, a hotel in Nuévalos, at the age of 74, after a long-term illness. Born in Cartagena, Murcia, on the 12th May 1935, MArtin trained in Barcelona before making his debut in Las hijas del Cid, an [...]

Sad news… one of the most recognisable character actors of Spanish cinema, Victor Israel, died last weekend.  Born in Barcelona, he attended the Escuela de actores de la Ciudad Condal before making his debut in the 1962 film Tierra de todos.  Over the next 45 years he appeared in over 150 films, generally in character [...]

Hey, looks like Jeff Blynn didn’t simply disappear after making a bunch of cop films in the seventies and eighties: he opened his own restaurant, and now it’s something of an institution: here’s the link on tripadvisor

Fun little article I found in an old issue of the Independent: It’s 50 years since the Fellini film that defined an era. Peter Popham reports For Philip Larkin the annus mirabilis was 1963 when “sexual intercourse began”. But Rome was a couple of jumps ahead, and this month Italy is celebrating the start of [...]

Here’s a name that was unfamiliar to me until watching the 1959 Alberto Sordi vehicle, Il moralista, directed by Giorgio Bianchi.  Hazel Rogers has a small part as one of a trio of dancers Sordi – playing a public censor who has become fascinated with the seemier side of life on a trip to Munich [...]