Rossano Brazzi

Handsome Italian actor and director Rossano Brazzi (1916-1994) personified the Latin Lover and romantic aristocrat in such Hollywood classics as South Pacific (1958), but he also starred in many European productions. In his 55 years career, he made more than 100 films, mainly in Italy and France, but also in Germany, Spain, Great Britain, Brazil, Argentina, and the USA. In Italy, he was also a hugely popular stage and TV actor and an accomplished stage director.


Italian postcard by B.F.F. Edit., no. 2071. Photo: Pesce / Scalera Film.


Italian postcard by ASER (A. Scarmiglia, Edizioni, Roma), no. 234. Photo: Pesce. Alida Valli and Rossano Brazzi in Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942).


Spanish collector's card by I.G. Viladot, Barcelona. Image: Cifesa.


Italian postcard by Rotalfoto, no. 90.


French postcard by E.D.U.G., no. 130.


Belgian postcard by Bromophoto, Brussels.

Electric

Rossano Brazzi was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1916. He was the son of Adelmo Brazzi, a shoemaker who later owned a leather factory and Maria Ghedini Brazzi. As a young man, Rossano was quite athletic – playing soccer, tennis, golf, swimming, fencing and boxing. He was particularly good at soccer and assumed the role of goalkeeper for the Florentine college team, where he stayed for two years. During his years at the San Marco University in Florence, he was also an amateur boxer. He quit boxing when he unintentionally but seriously hurt an opponent.

He became friendly with students who were active in the University's amateur theatre. His friends persuaded him to try out for a part. He did and got it. During his second year, he won an important role: the part of the prodigal son in Siro Angeli's 'La Casa'. In 1937, he earned his law degree and was sent by his father to practice law in Rome with an established lawyer. Meanwhile, Rossano actively pursued a stage and screen career. He started to work as an actor for a theatrical company, led by the actresses Irma and Emma Gramatica. When the company played Somerset Maugham's 'The Sacred Flame' in Rome, film producer Michele Scalera offered Brazzi a part in his forthcoming Processo e morte di Socrate/The Trial and Death of Socrates (Corrado D'Errico, 1939).

A year later, the 24-year-old actor astonished critics and the public alike with his electric film portrayal of a middle-aged Edmund Kean in the Alexandre Dumas adaptation Kean (Guido Brignone, 1940). Two years later he delivered a critically acclaimed and award-winning performance in the two-part classic Noi Vivi - Addio Kira/We The Living - Goodbye Kira (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942) opposite Alida Valli. Other films were Tosca/The Story of Tosca (Carl Koch, 1941), the first Italian Western Una donna dell'ovest/Girl of the Golden West (Carl Koch, 1942) with Michel Simon, and the drama I due Foscari/The Two Foscaris (Enrico Fulchignoni, 1942) based on a screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni.

His International break came in 1942 when the Ufa cast him opposite Zarah Leander in the film Damals/At That Time (Rolf Hansen, 1943). In 1942, however, Rossano Brazzi was also asked to move to Milan to make propaganda pictures under government sponsorship. He refused, feigning illness, and abandoned his film career for the duration.

Earlier, he had been asked to help the resistance. He capitalised upon his knowledge of the Cinécitta studio, which had been converted into a concentration camp. He helped smuggle inmates, many of them American, British and French prisoners of war. Seven days before the liberation of Rome, Brazzi was arrested by the German SS and was turned over to the Italian authorities. A week later, Brazzi's prison guards vanished and he walked out free.


Italian postcard by Aser, Roma, no. 264.


Italian postcard by Rotocalco Dagnino, Torino. Photo: publicity still of Germana Paolieri and Rossano Brazzi in the Lux production La forza bruta/Brute Force (Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, 1941).


Italian postcard by Zincografica, Firenze. Sent by mail in 1942. Photo: Scalera Film / Era Film, Roma. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942).


Italian postcard by B.F.F. Edit., no. 43120. Photo: Pesce / Scolera Film.


Italian postcard by Aser. Photo: Pesce.


Italian postcard by ASER (A. Scaramaglia, Edizioni, Roma). Photo: Pesce.


German postcard by Ross Verlag. Photo Difu.


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. A 3740/1, 1941-1944. Photo: Ufa / Villoresi.


German postcard by Film-Foto-Verlag, no. G 209, 1941-1944. Photo: Ufa.

Blue-eyed hunk

After the war, Rossano Brazzi starred in the enormously popular Aquila nera/Black Eagle (Riccardo Freda, 1946). Then his popularity declined in Italy, as filmmaking began to move in a new direction: the stark, gritty neorealist style. The neorealist directors associated Brazzi with swashbuckling adventures and romances.

Thus, when American producer David O. Selznick offered him the chance to make films in America, he went to Hollywood. At the time, he could read almost no English and his accent was extraordinarily bad. After a year he was finally lent out to producer Mervyn LeRoy who used the actor as the professor in Little Women (Mervyn Leroy, 1949). But Selznick decided not to pick up his option on the actor and Brazzi fled back to Italy. He starred opposite Anna Magnani in Vulcano/Volcano (William Dieterle, 1950), and returned to the stage where he had begun his career.

In 1952, Jean Negulesco, a director Brazzi had met in Hollywood, offered him a part in Three Coins in the Fountain (Jean Negulesco, 1954). As the love-smitten young Italian, he played the third male lead, behind Clifton Webb and Louis Jourdan. The part was small, but the picture did well and it introduced the blue-eyed hunk to international audiences as a new sex symbol.

It was his multi-hued portrayal of the impotent Count Vincenzo Toriato-Faurini opposite Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954) that won him international stardom. This success was followed by the leading male role opposite Katharine Hepburn in David Lean's romance Summertime (1955).

Brazzi became the first Italian actor since Rudolph Valentino to achieve the same global popularity and passion from his admirers. He played Latin Lovers in films like The Story of Esther Costello (David Miller, 1957) with Joan Crawford, Interlude (Douglas Sirk, 1957) with June Allyson and The Light in the Piazza (Guy Green, 1962) with Olivia de Havilland. His probably most famous role was in South Pacific (Joshua Logan, 1958) as Emile De Becque opposite Mitzi Gaynor. But his film roles tended to become routine and repetitive.


British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. W. 800. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Publicity still for Little Women (Mervyn Leroy, 1949) with June Allyson.


German postcard by Kunst und Bild, Berlin, no. A 180. Photo: Döring Film Gmbh.


German postcard by Kunst und Bild, Berlin, no. A 571. Photo: Vaselli, Rome / Generalcine Film Gmbh. Publicity still for La donna che inventò l'amore/The Woman Who Invented Love (Ferruccio Cerio, 1952).


German postcard by Kolibri-Berlag, no. 1360. Photo: United Artists. Publicity still for The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954).


German postcard by Rüdel-Verlag, Hamburg-Bergedorf, no. 1283. Photo: 20th Century Fox. Publicity still for Three Coins in a Fountain (Jean Negulesco, 1954).


Italian postcard by Casa Edite. Ballerini & Fratini, Firenze (B.F.F. Edit.), no. 3587. Photo: Dear Film. Rossano Brazzi in Loser Takes All (Ken Annakin, 1956).

Latin lover label

In the 1960s, Rossano Brazzi wasn't interested in resurrecting (again) the role of the Latin lover. In some of his most willingly comedic performances, he poked fun at his own image: as the smooth, suave and utterly silly Carlos Matabosch in The Bobo (Robert Parrish, 1967), in his brief but very funny role as Giorgio in Woman Times Seven (Vittorio De Sica, 1967) and as himself in Mondo Cane (Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti, Franco Prosperi, 1962). He turned to directing in the mid-1960s and was sometimes credited with the nom de film of Edward Ross. His best-known effort in this capacity was the modest family-oriented film Il Natale che quasi non fu/The Christmas That Almost Wasn't (1966), in which he also starred as the gleefully cartoonish Phineas T. Prune.

The late 1960s and early 1970s found him choosing more uncharacteristic projects, from the nerdy intellectual complete with the tortoiseshell glasses falling down his nose in La ragazza di bersagliere/Soldier's Girl (Alessandro Blasetti, 1966), to the sadistic and brutal Major Bernadelli in Mister Kingstreet's War/Heroes Die Hard (Percival Rubens, 1973), to the gloomy, insane Dr. Frankenstein in Terror! Il castello delle donne maledette/Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (Dick Randall, 1974).

His refusal to be typecast into characters known for their romantic gallantry and heroism found its way into criminals, sexual deviants, rapists, and Mafia dons. One of his most successful films of this period was the classic crime caper The Italian Job (Peter Collinson, 1969), in which he appeared as the murdered Roger Beckermann. On television, he was a regular on the Harold Robbins-created series The Survivors (1969), playing Onassis clone Antaeus Riakos. He also did guest appearances in popular series like Madigan (1972), Hawaii Five-O (1977), Police Woman (1978), Charlie’s Angels(1979) and The Love Boat (1982).

In Italy, he starred with Stéphane Audran in the TV mini-series Orient-Express (1980) and with Gabriel Byrne in Christopher Columbus (1985). His later films included The Great Waltz (Andrew L. Stone, 1972) with Horst Buchholz, The Final Conflict/The Omen III (Graham Baker, 1981) and Fear City (Abel Ferrara, 1984).

In 1984 Brazzi was indicted along with 36 others for international drug and weapons smuggling; the charges against him, however, were later dropped. Brazzi was working on the Horror film Fatal Frames (Al Festa, 1996) when he was hospitalised with a viral infection that disabled his nervous system. Rossano Brazzi died of complications following the neural virus, in 1994, in Rome, Italy. He was married to Florentine Baroness Lidia Bertolini from 1940 until her death in 1981, and to the German Ilse Fischer, from 1984 until his death. There were no children from these marriages.


Italian postcard by Bromofoto, no. 1221. Photo: Italy's News Photos.


British postcard. Photo: Associated British.


German Postcard by Kunst und Bild, Berlin. Photo: 20th Century Fox.


Italian postcard by Rotalfoto, no. 403.


Italian postcard, no. 459.


French postcard by Editions P.I., Paris, no. 624, offered by Les carbones Korès 'Carboplane'.


British card by the Reveille Fan Club, London. Photo: British Lion Films.

Sources: Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Rudi Polt (IMDb), BRAZZI! - the official Rossano Brazzi International Network, Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and IMDb.

This post was last updated on 7 August 2023.

Noi vivi (1942)

Alida Valli, Rossano Brazzi and Fosco Giachetti were the stars of the Italian film Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942). The film - in two parts - was one of the biggest box office hits in Italy during the Second World War. It was an adaptation of We the Living, the debut novel of the Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand, published in 1936. The anti-authoritarian film was soon banned by the Fascist government and pulled from theatres. More than forty years later, Rand found, restored and released the forgotten film. It received rave reviews.


Alida Valli. Italian postcard by Zincografica, Firenze. Photo: Scalera Film / Era Film, Roma. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942).


Rossano Brazzi. Italian postcard by Zincografica, Firenze. Sent by mail in 1942. Photo: Scalera Film / Era Film, Roma. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942).


Fosco Giachetti. Italian postcard by Zincografica, Firenze. Photo: Scalera Film / Era Film, Roma. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942).

A fanatic student denounces her to the police

Ayn Rand's novel We the Living had been published in an Italian translation in 1937. When director Goffredo Alessandrini read the book, he immediately thought it would make an excellent screen epic. He never secured the film rights from Ayn Rand. Italy was at war with the United States and acquiring rights to the novel would be a major obstacle. The Fascist Ministry of Culture had set up special laws with regards to negotiations for rights and copyrights with enemy countries. So the film was made without the novelist's consent or knowledge, and no attempt was later made to compensate her.

Goffredo Alessandrini was a very successful director during Benito Mussolini's regime. His films are noted for their extreme realism, and have been lauded as anticipating the Neo-Realist movement that was to follow the end of the war. Taking advantage of the laisser-faire policy of the time, Alessandrini and his young associate director and screenwriter Anton Majano simply decided to use Rand's novel and base their screenplay on it.

They knew that We the Living touched on volatile political issues in Fascist Italy, but they hoped they would be safe from repercussions because of the story's negative portrayal of the Soviet Union, Italy's wartime enemy. It was approved for filming due to the intervention of dictator Benito Mussolini’s son Vittorio.

We the living is a tale of doomed love within a corrupt political world. In 1922, after the Soviet Revolution, 18-years old Kira Argounova (Alida Valli), the beautiful and smart daughter of impoverished traders, settles in St Petersburg to study engineering.

Kira rebuffs a cousin who rises in the Communist Party and may remember the slight. She has an affair with a mysterious young man, Leo Kovalenski (Rossano Brazzi), son of an executed czarist admiral. He gets into political trouble and flees. A fanatic student, Pavel Sjerov (Emilio Cigoli), denounces Kira to the police. Politic commissioner Andrei (Fosco Giachetti) falls in love with Kira during her arrest and tries to liberate her, raising suspicions.

Freed, Kira tries to flee abroad with Leo, but their boat is intercepted and sinks. They survive but Leo catches typhoid and needs to go to a sanatorium in Crimea. Kira goes to Andrei to ask for help and becomes Andrei's lover in return. But can Leo forgive her being Andrei's mistress?


Italian postcard by ASER, no. 224. Photo: Pesce / Scalera Film. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942), with Alida Valli and Rossano Brazzi.


Italian postcard by ASER, no. 234. Photo: Pesce / Scalera Film. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942), with Rossano Brazzi and Alida Valli.


Italian postcard. Photo: publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942), with Rossano Brazzi and Alida Valli.

As much against fascism as against communism

Goffredo Alessandrini and screenwriter Anton Majano went with the screenplay to Scalera Films in Rome. The production company asked several other writers to rewrite scenes and alter the dialogue from the existing screenplay. The final draft ended up being so different from the screenplay produced by Alessandrini and Majano that they both decided to start shooting without a script and just follow the book. The pair wrote scenes at night and handed them to the actors in the morning. The result is an adaptation that is more faithful to the novel than is typical in film adaptations of the time.

The film starred Alida Valli, already a major star in Italy, as Kira, top box-office attraction Fosco Giachetti as Andrei, and the incredible handsome Rossano Brazzi as Leo. Many of the extras were White Russian emigres living in Rome. The production designers were also born in Russia. The whole film, even its exteriors, were shot at the studio lot of Scalera. Though the films were little censored by the fascist government as the delicate scenes were not shown to the censors, they were still permitted as the story itself was set in Soviet Russia and was directly critical of that regime.

As weeks went by, it soon became clear to Alessandrini and Majano that it would take longer than the customary three weeks of shooting to finish this film. They also realised that there was enough material for two films, but they chose not to share this information with the actors for fear they would demand to be paid double.

In September 1942, after nearly five months of shooting, the film was completed and presented at the Venice Film Festival where it was awarded the Volpi Cup. The film had a lukewarm reception among the press. Critics thought it to be too dark, long, and talkative. It went on general release in November of the same year as two separate films, Noi Vivi/We the Living and Addio Kira!/Goodbye Kira!. Audiences loved it and turned it into a huge commercial success. This not in the least because of the - then controversial - portrayal of an intelligent, sexually independent heroine.

The Italian public realised that the two films were as much against communism as against the Mussolini regime. Though some pro-Fascist lines had been added to the film, the story is as much an indictment of Fascism as it is of Communism. The Italian newspapers began objecting to it and saying that it was anti-Fascist, which it was, essentially. The authorities got wind of this and the film was banned. Though the film should have been destroyed, Massimo Ferrara, the studio chief for Scalera Films, hid the negative and offered the authorities a negative of another film to be demolished.

After the war, Scalera Film approached Ayn Rand to secure the literary rights to the film(s) so it could be re-released but she refused. Though Rand liked and was impressed by the film(s), she highly resented the distortion of her message with the addition of a few pro-Fascist additions to the film adaptation. A few years later, Scalera Films went into receivership and as part of the inventory of Scalera, both Noi Vivi and Addio Kira! were turned over to a holding company. The company relegated them to a vault where they remained for over twenty-five years.

The film was lost and forgotten for decades, until the late 1960s when Ayn Rand was able to locate the original nitrate negatives, still in good condition in the vault in Rome. Both films were restored, combined into one, and released (with English subtitles) in 1986 as We the Living at the Telluride Film festival in Colorado. There the film received rave reviews, over 44 years after its original release.


Italian postcard by B.F.F. Edit., no. 224. Photo: Pesce / Scalera Film. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942) with Fosco Giachetti.


Italian postcard by Casa Editrice Ballerini & Fratini, Firenze (B.F.F. Edit.), no. 4397. Photo: Pesce / Scalera Film. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942), with Rossano Brazzi and Alida Valli


Italian postcard by B.F.F. Edit., no. 4400. Photo: Pesce / Scalera Film. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942) with Fosco Giachetti.


Italian postcard by B.F.F. Edit., no. 4423. Photo: Pesce / Scalera Film. Publicity still for Noi Vivi/We the Living (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1942) with Fosco Giachetti.

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.