Franco Nero

Francesco Clemente Giuseppe Sparanero was born in Emilia-Romagna in 1941 and took the name Franco Nero. Django, in 1966, made him a pop-culture fixture before he was twenty-five: a stranger dragging a coffin through mud, saying almost nothing, and the image outlived the film that produced it. He has since taken well over two hundred parts.

What is remarkable is how little he was contained by that. In the same handful of years he played Abel in a biblical epic, Lancelot in Camelot, and then a run of Italian genre pictures that were the industry's actual engine: Texas, Adios and Massacre Time in 1966, The Mercenary in 1968, Companeros in 1970, and Keoma in 1976, which is the strange, mournful late one worth seeking out. He also worked for art-house directors without changing register at all. Bunuel used him in Tristana, Fassbinder cast him as the tormented lieutenant in Querelle, and he took the crime pictures seriously too, playing the honest captain in The Day of the Owl.

Hollywood mostly wanted him as an accent with a uniform, which is how he ends up as General Esperanza in Die Hard 2. The late phase has been more fun than that. He turns up in Django Unchained as the man who asks the new Django to spell his name, plays Julius, who runs the hotel in Rome, in John Wick: Chapter 2, voices Uncle Topolino in Cars 2, has been the Pope twice, and is still taking work into his eighties.