Sergio Fantoni dead

Sergio Fantoni dead, goodbye to the actor and voice actor of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now

He was not on the list.

He was born in Rome, the son of actor Cesare Fantoni (1905–1963). In films from the late 1940s, he worked mainly in his own country but made several appearances in American films in the 1960s, most notably opposite Frank Sinatra in the war film Von Ryan's Express, made in 1965. In 1960 he played the villainous Haman in Esther and the King, starring Joan Collins and Richard Egan in the title roles. Among his TV roles, he appeared alongside Anglo-Italian actress Cherie Lunghi in the Channel 4 series The Manageress.

With that face a little bit like that, with the expression a little bit like that that we have made the history of acting in the 1900s. He also died Sergio Fantoni. He was 89 years old. A column, a legend, a colossus. A complete, total, borderless actor. From the soft and peremptory dubbing (was the voice of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now), to all that classical theater that merged in the tension and quality of research (Luca Ronconi, Giorgio Strehler), up to genre cinema, Hollywood, even shameless b-movie.

Fantoni together, among others, a Giancarlo Sbragia, Luigi Vannucchi, Eros Pagni, Raoul Grassilli, Umberto Orsini, represented that flexible and popular idea of ​​the profession of the actor who knew how to condense style and substance by naturally involving the various media channels of the Italian show between the fifties, sixties and seventies. Making the TV of the time, which was RAI, a stage on a par with any cinema screen or theater stage. Fantoni was born in Rome in August 1930. A family already engaged in artistic activity, the handsome boy was routed to architecture and engineering studies for a more elegant profession, but if talent flows through his veins, sooner or later he comes out and floods life. The debut occurs with small parts in the post-war films (Matarazzo, Francisci), but it is the “tour” of Luchino Visconti that highlights it. In 1954, in fact, he played a secondary role in Senso by the Milanese master. And from there begin more delineated and important parts in historical films and peplums. So much so that in 1959, one of the greatest directors of the Italian TV dramas, Anton Giulio Majano, wanted him to star in the nineteenth century, one of the first great serial hits of Rai, where the Roman actor plays the poet and patriot Costantino Nigra, the hidden soul of the diplomacy of the Savoy kingdom to trigger the second war of independence against Austria. But Fantoni was not one we would say today “if he pulls it”. Act in roles and in contexts different from each other. It is appreciated by the public, transversely, without arrogance. So in the cinema, at the time ultra-popular consumption, everyone wants it back. Despite his physical prowess, he takes a few slaps from Tomas Milian in Citto Maselli’s I Delfini (1960) shot in a splendid black and white in Ascoli Piceno. In the same year he played a bizarre horror movie like Seddok, Satan’s heir, but also Rossellini’s Era notte a Roma and a comedy like Puccini’s L’employee.

Fantoni has a sensational flexibility and the authentic fabric of luxury supporting actors. Still between ’61 and ’63 he is in the cast of an unjustly mistreated Giuliano Montaldo’s Pigeon shooting, always in the historical area of ​​the Second World War Ten Italians for a German (based on the facts of the Ardeatine pits) and still excels in Catherine of Russia none other than under the direction of Umberto Lenzi. From ’63 to ’66 the Hollywood call arrives where Fantoni stars in thriller (Intrigue in Stockholm), historical films (Colonel Von Ryan with Raffaella Carrà!) and for Blake Edwards. Then again he returns to Italy and is in the cast of the latest film by Julien Duvivier (together with Alain Delon), Diabolically yours, as in Sacco and Vanzetti di Montaldo. Meanwhile, the Roman actor opens, or rather opens wide the doors of the theaters where he had already made his debut towards the end of the fifties. With Luca Ronconi and Valentina Fortunato (his wife in the sixties), Giancarlo and Mattia Sbragia, Vannucchi and Ivo Garrani he founded the first theater cooperative, Gli Associati. But for Strehler, Squarzina, Patroni Griffi he is reciting the classic texts of Shakespeare, Pirandello, Feydau, but above all the new works by Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Tom Stoppard, Eugene O’Neill, and also a Last Krapp tape by Beckett, that Fantoni makes himself known and makes the theater known to a more attentive and mass audience.

In the eighties with the advent of commercial TV for Fantoni, as for dozens of colleagues who had made the history of acting, the incubation period begins for a few close admirers and fans. Still theater, very few old man roles or cameos. In 1997 he underwent surgery on the larynx and finally said goodbye to the scenes, dedicating himself to directing and theater productions. The voice actor activity is also intense (in addition to the famous Brando / Kurts in Coppola’s film is also, among others, Klaus Kinski in Aguirre by Herzog). A loss that leaves its mark. A clear and magnificent fragment of a beautiful and popular world that goes away.