Vallone, Raf

(1916-2002)

   Actor. Endowed with handsome good looks and a strong athletic build, Raffaele (shortened to Raff) Vallone was one of the leading male actors of the postwar period.

   Having tried unsuccessfully to pursue a career as a professional soccer player, Vallone studied law and literature at the University of Turin, graduating in both. Before joining the ranks of the Resistance movement, he landed a small walk-on role in Goffredo Alessandrini's Noi vivi (We the Living, 1942). After the war he worked as a sports and cultural writer for the Communist daily L'Unita before playing a strong supporting role in Giuseppe De Santis's runaway success, Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949). His acting career was assured as he was called to play the lead roles in De Santis's Non c'e pace fra gli ulivi (Under the Olive Tree, 1950), Pietro Germi's Il cammino della speranza (Path of Hope, 1950), and the powerful, even if at times excessively melodramatic, part of Bruno in Curzio Malaparte's Il Cristo proibito (The Forbidden Christ, 1951). Alberto Lattuada gave him the very sympathetic role of Andrea in Anna (1951), after which he played Giuseppe Garibaldi in Alessandrini's historical drama, Camicie Rosse (Red Shirts, 1952). Having by now begun to acquire an international reputation, he was called to France to play the male lead opposite Simone Signoret in Marcel Carne's Therese Raquin (1953), following which Lattuada provided him with more positive roles as the progressive Communist mayor in La spiaggia (The Beach, 1954) and the father in Guendalina (1957). In the late 1950s he extended himself further by taking to the stage, receiving particular acclaim for his portrayal of Eddie Carbone in Peter Brook's Parisian production of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, a role that he reprised in Sidney Lumet's 1961 screen adaptation of the play. After playing Sophia Loren's sometime lover in Vittorio De Sica's La ciociara (Two Women, 1960), he was lured to Hollywood, where he gave many creditable performances including that of Count Ordonez in Anthony Mann's El Cid (1961) and Cardinal Quarenghi in Otto Preminger's The Cardinal (1963), the first of many clerics he would play from then on.

   He subsequently appeared in a wide variety of films, from political thrillers such as John Huston's The Kremlin Letter (1970) and Otto Preminger's Rosebud (1975) to B-grade horror films like William M. Rose's The Girl in Room 2a (1973). At the same time he worked extensively for television in Italian miniseries such as Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po, 1971) and Marco Visconti (1975) and in American telefilms such as Honor Thy Father (1973), in which he played New York gangster Joe Bonanno. Fittingly, perhaps, one of his last on-screen roles was the part of the honest Cardinal Lamberto in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather: Part III (1990). In 2001 Vallone recounted his long and interesting career in his autobiographical Alfabeto della memoria (An Alphabet of Memory).

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira