Franco Interlenghi obituary

The Italian film and stage actor Franco Interlenghi, who has died aged 83, will be remembered for two masterpieces of postwar Italian cinema. He was the elder of the two Roman urchins in Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) and went on to be the semiautobiographical Moraldo in Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni – lieterally big calves, or loafers (1953). In this he played the youngest of the band of provincial layabouts and the only good-looking one, who at the end of the film decides to quit the Adriatic seaside resort, intended to be Rimini (though it was not actually filmed in that town, Fellini’s birthplace, which he left for Rome in search of a more interesting future). This character would evolve into Marcello in La Dolce Vita, played by Marcello Mastroianni, with whom Interlenghi had acted on stage in Luchino Visconti’s impressive production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

Born in Rome into a lower-middle-class family, when he heard a film director was looking for young boys for a film, Franco, then 15, liked the possibility of earning some extra pocket money, and went to the audition, joining the queue of hopeful lads. When De Sica saw him and asked if he liked boxing and had experience of it, the honest youth replied no, and was dismissed. But he queued up again. And this time, when asked the same question, he replied that he was indeed an enthusiastic boxer. He got the part.

He was praised by the critics for his sensitive performance, and decided it might be worth his while to continue acting. De Sica wanted to cast him in a stage production he was preparing, but which never materialised. He did succeed, however, in getting into Luchino Visconti’s company, first taking small parts in 1948 in what was one of the most acclaimed productions of postwar Italy, a Troilus and Cressida lavishly staged in the Boboli gardens of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, with a cast that was almost a Who’s Who of Italian theatre stars of the times. The same year he played in another Visconti Shakespeare production, As You Like It. And in 1949 he took the role of Mastroianni’s younger brother in the Miller play.

That year he also appeared in Alessandro Blasetti’s spectacular Fabiola, but the screen role that won him popularity in Italy and attracted international attention was that of the handsome young lead in Luciano Emmer’s Domenica d’Agosto (Sunday in August, 1950), a working-class boy who pretends to be bourgeois in order to woo a girl whose family are among the crowd enjoying a Sunday on a cheap Roman beach. In 1952 he played one of the revolutionary youngsters in the first of the box-office hits based on Giovannino Guareschi’s Don Camillo stories, starring Fernandel as the Italian priest at war with the local communists. He went on to appear in two American films made in Cinecittà, nicknamed Hollywood-on-the-Tiber: Joseph L Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954) and Charles Vidor’s A Farewell to Arms (1957).

In France he played the young lover of Brigitte Bardot, successfully defended on a robbery charge by lawyer Jean Gabin, in Claude Autant-Lara’s En Cas de Malheur (Love Is My Profession, 1958). Michel Roux provided Interlenghi’s voice for the French version.

Work with a succession of Italian directors, including a Mario Monicelli comedy Padri e Figli (Fathers and Sons, 1957) and the leading role in the Italian episode of Michelangelo Antonioni’s three-part I Vinti (The Vanquished, 1952) followed. In 1959 he appeared in Roberto Rossellini’s Venice Golden Lion winner Il Generale della Rovere, starring De Sica. The following year he was in the less impressive Rossellini film Viva l’Italia!, commissioned for the celebration of the centenary of Garibaldi’s exploits in Sicily.

Around the time of Amori di Mezzo Secolo (Mid-Century Loves, 1954) he met the actress Antonella Lualdi, whom he married in 1955. They had two daughters, Stella and Antonellina, both of whom had brief acting careers. His own career continued over the next decades, but his popularity began to diminish. As one Italian paper headlined his obituary, “He was too good-looking as a child to have success for ever”. Even so, he continued getting parts in films and in recent years in television – a Monte Hellman western, China 9, Liberty 37 (1978), an erotic film by Tinto Brass, Miranda (1985), and Giuseppe Tornatore’s first film, about the Neapolitan mafia, Il Camorrista (1986). He played a leading role in Pummarò (Tomato, 1990), the first film directed by the actor Michele Placido, and in Romanzo Criminale (2005), a mafia thriller also directed by Placido, with whom he became close friends. The two appeared together, sharing leading roles and applause in a tour of Pirandello short plays.

Franco and Lualdi appeared in many films together, but her career waned and the couple separated; Lualdi became a pop singer and found new success in France, where she settled. Franco made occasional appearances in his old age, the last in a potboiler called La Bella Società (2010).

He is survived by his wife and daughters.