Gino Cervi

Throughout his celebrated career, Gino Cervi worked with some of the greatest filmmakers in cinematic history, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Vittorio De Sica, and Julian Duvivier. One of the best known Italian actors of the 1950s and '60s, Cervi is primarily remembered for his role in the many "Don Camillo" films, as the Communist mayor who constantly struggles with the local priest. The son of a theater critic, Cervi began acting for the stage in 1924. He scored his first lead role in a film 10 years later, in the obscure "Frontier," and became a bona fide motion-picture star with Alessandro Blasetti's "Aldebaran" in 1935. His round face and carefully trimmed moustache became yet more recognizable after the first installment of the "Don Camillo" films, "The Little World of Don Camillo," in 1952. Legendary filmmaker Vittorio De Sica cast Cervi opposite Montgomery Clift in his 1953 feature, "Indiscretion of an American Wife." Outside Italy, Cervi had a supporting role as a cardinal in Peter Glenville's award-winning 1964 epic, "Becket," starring Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole. Cervi's son, Tonino Cervi, was also involved in cinema, and produced one of his father's later films, "Maigret in Pigalle." The film was based on the television crime show "Le inchieste del commissario Maigret," in which Gino Cervi played the title character. This series marked his final screen credit. He died in 1974.