MARITAL STATUS
Profession Actor
Nationality Italian
Birth February 17, 1916 (Tropéa, Calabria – Italy)
Death November 3, 2002
BIOGRAPHY
Before working in cinema, Raf Vallone had been a professional football player in Turin, a lawyer, then a film and theater critic. Her article on the living conditions of women working in Italian rice fields earned her the attention of director Giuseppe de Santis , who offered her the lead role of Bitter Rice alongside Silvana Mangano and Vittorio Gassman . He found the latter in 1951 on the set of Anna . In 1999, in Toni , it was opposite the son of the famous Italian actor, Alessandro Gassman , that he played the last important role of his career.
His early career was marked by Italian neo-realism. He toured again under the direction of Giuseppe de Santis in Onze Heures Sonnent (1952) then La Garçonnière (1960). It will also be directed by Dino Risi on The Sign of Venus (1953), and Vittorio De Sica on La Ciociara (1960) alongside Jean-Paul Belmondo and Sophia Loren . An eclectic actor, he tried his hand at very different roles: he was a simple minor in The Road to Hope (1950), then played the hero of Italian independence Garibaldi in The Red Shirts two years later.
From 1953, his career took on an international dimension. That year, he seduced Simone Signoret in Thérèse Raquin by Marcel Carné . His on-screen persona owes a lot to his dark physique. At the beginning of the sixties, the actor turned to Hollywood: he found Sophia Loren on Le Cid (1961) by Anthony Mann , before filming an adaptation of Phèdre directed by Jules Dassin . In 1961, he was a dockworker whose family was torn apart in Seen from the Bridge by Sidney Lumet .
Otto Preminger gave him two secondary roles twelve years apart in The Cardinal (1963) and Rosebud (1975). In the meantime, Raf Vallone tried his hand at various genres such as the western with Nevada Smith (1966) or the thriller with The Letter from the Kremlin (1970) by John Huston .
From the beginning of the seventies, the actor went through a more difficult passage. He is found in many B-movies. During the decade that followed, he devoted himself more and more to television while continuing his career in the theater, which he never left. In 1990, Francis Ford Coppola hired him to play Cardinal Lamberto, assassinated when he had just been named pope at the end of The Godfather, Part 3 . This will be the last role of international scope of his long and prolific career.
