Massimo Girotti (18 May 1918 – 5 January 2003) was an Italian film actor whose career spanned seven decades.
Born in Mogliano, in the province of Macerata, Girotti developed his athletic physique by swimming and playing polo. While studying engineering, he attracted the attention of Mario Soldati, who offered him a small part in the film Dora Nelson (1939), but it was not until later, in Alessandro Blasetti's La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown) (1941) and Roberto Rossellini's Un Pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns) (1942), that he began to make an impression as a serious actor. In 1943 came a turning point in his career when Luchino Visconti cast him opposite the torrid Clara Calamai in Ossessione (Obsession), an earlier adaptation of the same novel on which Hollywood's The Postman Always Rings Twice is based. The film marked, in a sense, the birth of Italian neo-realism. Some of his notable post-war films include Caccia tragica (The Tragic Hunt) (1946) by Giuseppe De Santis and In nome della legge (1949) (In the Name of the Law) by Pietro Germi.
In 1950, he starred opposite Lucia Bosé in Michelangelo Antonioni's first full-length feature, Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair) (1950). In 1953, he played Spartacus in an Italian epic film known in the US as Sins of Rome and then, returned to work again for Visconti, in Senso (1954), giving perhaps the finest performance of his career. In the years which followed, he appeared in many mainly Italian films for directors such as Lizzani, Bolognini, Vittorio Cottafavi, Lattuada, but it was not until 1968 that he once again played a role worthy of his talents - that of the father in Pasolini's Teorema (Theorem) with Terence Stamp and Silvana Mangano. Two years later, Pasolini cast him as Creonte opposite Maria Callas in his Medea (1969). In 1972, he was in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris. That same year he made a rare appearance in a horror film when he agreed to a supporting role in Baron Blood as a favor to its director Mario Bava.
He continued to act in character roles for the next thirty years. Some of the films he appeared in have been notable, including Joseph Losey's Monsieur Klein (1976) with Alain Delon and Jeanne Moreau, Art of Love (1983) by Walerian Borowczyk, the 1985 television miniseries Quo Vadis?, Roberto Benigni's Il mostro (The Monster) (1994).
He died in Rome of a heart attack after having just completed his last film, Ferzan Özpetek's La Finestra di fronte (Facing Windows) (2003).
Source: Article "Massimo Girotti" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
as Self (archive footage)
as Self
as Simone / Davide Veroli
as Self (archive footage)
as Donato
as Emilio Venditti
as il condomino distinto
as Ing. Staino
as Vergiotti(2 eps)
as Le comte di Falco(4 eps)
as L'envoyé du Pape (« Les Années Lumière »)(2 eps)
as Envoyé du Pape
as Count Valery Du Terrail
as The Old Pretender / Featuring
as Someier(6 eps)
as Werner von Heiden
as Duca Medina Coeli(4 eps)
as Aulus Plautius(6 eps)
as Ovid
as Colonel
as Tom Lingard
as Marcello Masini
as Viceroy Caracciolo(1 ep)
as Palita
as Charles, Florence's husband
as Count Stefano Egano
as Il Questore Spaini
as Gaudenzio Pesce
as Giacomo Casanova
as Eugenio Dazzi
as Fred Norton
as Olmi
as Marcel
as Gabriele
as Dr. Karl Hummel
as George Powell(5 eps)
as Creonte
as Giuseppe Romagna Manoja
as Guido
as Alex
as John Utterson(4 eps)
as Tassi
as Paolo, the Father
as Sportsman (segment "La strega bruciata viva")
as Friend of Charles
as Ugo Sanfelice
as Nicolo, Marco's Father
as Pro-consul Caius Cornelius Maximus)
as Capitano alla finestra (uncredited)
as Leclerc
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as Don Paolo Conti
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as Guglielmo Curti
as Pedro Sandoval
as Ugo Parenti
as Don Antonio
as Maggiore Montanari
as Valentin
as dottor Andrea Pitti
as Il Marchese Roberto Ussoni
as Sandro Ademari
as André Lorenz
as Dr. Guido Aureli
as Avv. Roberto Martini
as Andrea Grazzi
as Marco Spada
as Spartacus
as Massimo Dal Colle
as Giorgio Biserta
as Fred Nolan
as Doctor Marchal
as Nando the Unemployed
as Ingegnere Roberto
as Guido
as Carlo
as Il pretore Guido Schiavi
as Sebastian
as Stanis Archena
as Giovanni Piscitello
as Paolo Bertoni
as Marcello Mariani
as Nane, il veneziano
as Michele
as Rocco
as Vincenzo Masi
as Nando Mancini
as Luigi Monotti
as The blind youth
as Andrea
as (segment "Ricordati di santificare le feste")
as Franco
as Gino Costa
as Tommaso Rossi
as Lieutenant Gino Rossati
as Marco Sassoli
as Tremal-Naik
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as Arminio / King Licinio
as Enrico Gabardo
