Terence Hill

Hill started as a child actor in Italian pictures and was still a young leading man when Visconti put him in The Leopard in 1963. Before the westerns proper he did a run of German Karl May adaptations, Frontier Hellcat, Rampage at Apache Wells, Flaming Frontier, which is where he learned to sit on a horse for a living.

The spaghetti westerns came next, three of them as a character named Cat Stevens opposite Bud Spencer, and then in 1970 They Call Me Trinity turned the whole genre into a comedy and made both of them famous. The formula held for the better part of two decades: Hill fast, grinning and unbothered, Spencer slow and enormous, the pair of them dismantling a bar. His specific skill is that he never looks like he is trying. He plays a brawl the way other actors play a card game, and he underplays every punchline, which is why the films still work with the sound off.

What followed was a long comic career built mostly on variations of that pairing: Watch Out, We're Mad, Crime Busters, Who Finds a Friend Finds a Treasure, Miami Supercops. My Name Is Nobody in 1973 is the exception, a western with real melancholy in it. He made an English-language Foreign Legion picture, March or Die, played Lucky Luke twice, took the title role in Don Camillo, and in 2000 found a second national career on Italian television as the crime-solving priest of Father Matteo. At his peak he was among the highest paid actors in Italy.