Brazzi, Rossano

(1916-1994)

   Actor and director. A keen sports-man in his youth, Brazzi became interested in theater while studying law at the University of Florence. In 1937 he moved to Rome and began acting professionally in the company of Emma Grammatica. While making a name for himself onstage, he also began to appear in films, playing his first lead role in Guido Brignone's Kean (1940) before appearing as Cavaradossi in Carl Koch's Tosca (1940) and then as the Russian nobleman Leo Kovalenski in Goffredo Alessandrini's two-part epic, Noi vivi (We the Living, 1942). After the war he continued to alternate between the Italian stage and screen before being drawn to Hollywood in the late 1940s to play Professor Bhaer in Mervyn LeRoy's production of Little Women (1949). His real fame, however, came in the next decade when—in films such as Jean Negulesco's Three Coins in a Fountain (1954), Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The Barefoot Countessa (1954), David Lean's Summertime (1955), and Joshua Logan's South Pacific (1958)—he came to incarnate the Hollywood ideal of the suave Latin lover.

   Indeed, he became so identified with the image of the irresistible Mediterranean playboy that he was featured as himself, being literally mobbed by hundreds of women, in Gualtiero Jacopetti's "shockumentary" Mondo cane (A Dog's World, 1962).

   From the late 1960s, in addition to appearing in a wide variety of films ranging from spaghetti Westerns like Il giorno del giudizio (Day of Judgment, 1971) to sexy horror thrillers such as Terror! Il castello delle donne maledette (Dr. Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, 1974), Brazzi was also often seen on both European and American television, making guest appearances in episodes of popular long-running series such as The Survivors (1969), Hawaii Five-O (1977), Charlie's Angels (1979), and The Love Boat (1982). At the same time he also tried his hand at directing, producing a charming children's fantasy, The Christmas That Almost Wasn't (1966), the heist film Sette uomini e un cervello (Criminal Affair, 1968), and the taut and stylish giallo Salvare la faccia (Psychout for Murder, 1969). His last appearance on the big screen was as the counterespionage chief Marini in Pasquale Squitieri's Vatican spy thriller, Russicum, i giorni del diavolo (The Third Solution, 1989).

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira