Gabriele Ferzetti
Birthday: 1925-03-17 Place of Birth: Rome, Italy
Synopsis
Gabriele Ferzetti (born Pasquale Ferzetti; 17 March 1925 – 2 December 2015) was an Italian actor with more than 160 credits across film, television, and stage. His career was at its peak in the 1950s and 1960s. Ferzetti's first leading role was in the film Lo Zappatore (1950). He portrayed Puccini twice in the films Puccini (1953) and Casa Ricordi (1954). He made his international breakthrough in Michelangelo Antonioni's controversial L'Avventura (1960) as a restless playboy. After a series of romantic performances, he acquired a reputation in Italy as an elegant, debonair, and somewhat aristocratic looking leading man. Ferzetti starred as Lot in John Huston's biblical epic, The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966), and played railroad baron Morton in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Perhaps his best known role, internationally, was in the James Bond movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) as Marc Ange Draco, although his voice was dubbed by British actor David de Keyser. He was perhaps best known to non-mainstream audiences for his role as the psychiatrist, Hans, in Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974). In the 1970s, he appeared in a significant number of crime films, often as an inspector. He appeared in Julia and Julia, opposite Laurence Olivier in Inchon (1982), and the cult film, First Action Hero. Later in his career, he played the role of Nono in the TV series Une famille formidable, while also appearing in Luca Guadagnino's 2009 film I Am Love. Ferzetti died on 2 December 2015, aged 90. Description above from the Wikipedia article Gabriele Ferzetti, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Acting
First Action Hero
A maverick cop takes on the seedy criminal underbelly of Miami singlehanded.
Private Crimes
This Italian TV mini-series (4 episodes) is directed by giallo great Sergio Martino and stars some of the most recognizable stars of Italian genre cinema, including Edwige Fenech, Ray Lovelock, and Alida Valli. Story: Sandra Venturi, studying to be a singer at the conservatory of music in the Italian town of Lucca, has a promising career in opera ahead of her. On the eve of her nineteenth birthday, during a thunderstorm, the young singer leaves the apartment she shares with her mother Nicole Venturi, a journalist. Sandra is on her way to a secret rendezvous with a married man. He is murdered shortly before Sandra arrives at the deserted villa outside the town which they had chosen as their meeting point. When Marco's corpse is discovered the next morning, Nicole senses that reporting this case will make her famous outside her local region. What she doesn't know is that her daughter is also missing ...
The Basileus Quartet
The lives of the surviving members of the Basileus Quartet, a chamber group that has been playing successfully around the world for more than 30 years, are turned upside down after the death of the leader, Oscar Guarneri. The three aging musicians decide to split up to pursue those pleasures they've denied themselves too long.
Inchon
Gen. Douglas MacArthur leads a Korean War campaign, and the war tests a married couple's relationship.
The Psychic
A woman with psychic powers has a vision of a murder that took place in a house owned by her husband.
Encounters in the Deep
An oceanographer diving in the Bermuda Triangle discovers an undersea world.
End of the Game
Hans Baerlach is a Swiss police detective who has dedicated much of his career to pursuing powerful and allegedly murderous businessman Richard Gastmann. Though Baerlach's partner meets his demise while investigating Gastmann, his replacement, Walter Tschanz, is undaunted. Meanwhile, the lovely Anna Crawley becomes involved in the case, which proceeds to take many twists and turns.
La Orca
A teenage girl is kidnapped by 3 guys and taken to an abandoned house in the country, where she is made to write her own ransom letter. She soon discovers that one of her captors is infatuated with her and she will use those feelings to stay alive.
The Night Porter
A concentration camp survivor discovers her former torturer and lover working as a porter at a hotel in postwar Vienna. When the couple attempt to re-create their sadomasochistic relationship, his former SS comrades begin to stalk them.
Cannabis
Serge Morgan is a killer working for the American Mafia. After performing a contract in New York for his employers, he takes the plane back to Paris and, during the flight, he gets to know Jane, the rich daughter of an ambassador. Once in Orly Airport he gets seriously wounded by the men of French drug kingpin Henri Emery. He manages to escape them though and takes refuge at Jane's. Passion sets in between the killer and the young lady. As of then, sex will be intertwined with blood and death. For better or worse...
Hitler: The Last Ten Days
Hitler: The Last Ten Days takes us into the depths of der Furher’s Berlin bunker during his final days. Based on the book by Gerhard Boldt, it provides a bleak look at the goings-on within, and without.
High Voltage
José, a young mechanic, arrives in Madrid to make it big. After being conned he loses his savings, and is taken in by Elisa, a photographer. She introduces him to Pablo and Laura. Laura makes him an offer he cant refuse and then his troubles really begin.
Million Dollar Eel
An heiress (Piccolo) fakes her own kidnapping in order to get money from her parents and hides in the river Po's delta among eel fisherman and is helped by a small time smuggler (Toffolo).
Machine Gun McCain
After serving 12 years behind bars for armed robbery, tough guy Hank McCain finds himself the pawn of a ruthless mob runt's rebellion against a high level don. When McCain discovers that he's been betrayed and abandoned by his new employer, he retaliates with a high stakes Las Vegas casino heist that erupts into all-out war on the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. Neither blood, nor lust, nor wedding vows can come between McCain and his money ... or his machine gun.
The Confession
The vice-minister of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia, knowing he's being watched and followed, is one day arrested and put into solitary confinement by his blackmailers.
That Splendid November
In the most traditional Sicilian, a 18 year old is in full arousal. His relationship with breathtaking mature woman will create a great controversy in the retrograde Sicilian society.
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
James Bond tracks his archnemesis, Ernst Blofeld, to a mountaintop retreat in the Swiss alps where he is training an army of beautiful, lethal women. Along the way, Bond falls for Italian contessa Tracy Draco, and marries her in order to get closer to Blofeld.
Once Upon a Time in the West
As the railroad builders advance unstoppably through the Arizona desert on their way to the sea, Jill arrives in the small town of Flagstone with the intention of starting a new life.
Bandits in Rome
After professional stickup man Mario Corda is jailed, his young, ambitious partner -- who covets both Corda's life and his wife -- cuts loose, leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake.
Crime on a Summer Morning
An ill-assorted group of international criminals executes a tightly-planned ransom sting in Spain. Things go along swimmingly until various tensions within the group come to the fore.
La calda vita
Attractive teenager Sergia usually hangs out with her older sister and her circle of mature friends. For a change, she is convinced by two teenage male friends to go for a beach vacation. Their main motive is to try to win her affection and get to sleep with her. Tragedy soon follows when the love triangle unravels.
Jessica
When the men of a Sicilian village start obsessing over ravishing blonde midwife Jessica, angry females revolt by refusing to have sex with their husbands. As the local priest tries to encourage procreation, Jessica falls for a tricky recluse.
Imperial Venus
The romanticized gallant adventures of Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon's sister. First "engaged" to the Conventionnel Fréron, then separated from him by her brother for political reasons, Pauline joined Napoleon in the Italian army, where she fell in love with the comté de Canouville. But the First Consul married her to his friend, General Leclerc, whom she followed on the expedition to Saint-Domingue. Unconcerned about fidelity, she began to love her husband just as he was about to die of yellow fever. Back in France, she was soon consoled by other gallants. Napoleon, now emperor, hastened to marry her off to Prince Borghese, but he was unable to make her love him. She soon returned to Paris to lead the life of a gallant woman, incognito, and again met Canouville, whom the emperor tried in vain to separate from her. But soon the Russian campaign begins, and her lover is killed. All that remains for Pauline, this time disconsolate, is to reconcile with her brother on the road to exile.
L'Avventura
Claudia and Anna join Anna's lover, Sandro, on a boat trip to a remote volcanic island. When Anna goes missing, a search is launched. In the meantime, Sandro and Claudia become involved in a romance despite Anna's disappearance, though the relationship suffers from guilt and tension.
Hannibal
A Carthaginian general attempts to cross the Alps with an army of elephants in order to conquer Rome.
House of Ricordi
The film covers a hundred years in the lives of the Ricordi family, the Milan publishing house of the title, and the various composers and other historic personalities, whose careers intersected with the growth of the Ricordi house. It beautifully draws the parallel between the great music of the composers, the historic and social upheavals of their times, as well as the "smaller stories" of the successive generations of Ricordi.
