Raf Vallone

From the Torino pitch to the ashes of war

Raf Vallone played as a midfielder for Torino before the movies put a camera in front of him. He won the Italian Cup in 1936. But his mind was in the L'Unità newsroom and in film criticism.

He was not the typical conservatory heartthrob. During the Nazi occupation of Italy, he risked his neck as a partisan. He was arrested and ended up in a concentration camp in Germany, an experience that stripped away any trace of artifice for the rest of his life.

When he came home, he went back to journalism.

Giuseppe De Santis spotted him in an office and knew he had the lead for Bitter Rice in 1949. Vallone didn't want to be an actor, since he considered it an unserious trade for a left-wing intellectual. In the end, he accepted for the money.

That shoot alongside Silvana Mangano took him out of the newsrooms for good. His rugged build and direct gaze fit what Italy needed to project after the war. He didn't fake the toughness; it came standard.

And it worked.

The leap to the big screen

In 1953 he moved to France to shoot Thérèse Raquin under Marcel Carné. He quickly mastered languages. He spoke French, English and Spanish fluently, which allowed him to work across half of Europe without needing dubbing.

Arthur Miller personally chose him for the stage adaptation of A View from the Bridge in Paris. Vallone played Eddie Carbone almost six hundred times. Sidney Lumet called him in 1962 to bring that same intensity to the big screen.

It was his definitive passport to major international productions.

Because Vallone wasn't after fame, he was after precision. In 1961, he worked on El Cid by Anthony Mann, shot largely in Spain. He played Count Ordóñez and shared the frame with Charlton Heston.

Hollywood often cast him in roles of moral or religious authority (sometimes both at once).

The Confession of Michael Corleone

The role that cemented him in collective memory was that of Cardinal Lamberto. Francis Ford Coppola gave him the script for The Godfather Part III in 1990. His confession scene with Al Pacino is an exercise in absolute restraint.

In 1994, he took part in the series Vientos de guerra for Italian television. He kept up his work pace for as long as his health allowed. He never officially retired from the industry.

He died at a clinic in Rome in October 2002.

He was 86 years old.

His last credited appearance was in the film Toni in 1999. The funeral was held at the Church of the Artists in Piazza del Popolo, before a crowd that barely remembered his past as a professional soccer player.

The ceremony lasted exactly forty minutes.