Raf Vallone

Raf Vallone was born on Feb 17, 1916 in Italy. Raf Vallone's big-screen debut came with We the Living directed by Goffredo Alessandrini in 1942, strarring Un marinaio (uncredited). Raf Vallone is known for A Season of Giants directed by Jerry London, F. Murray Abraham stars as Julius II and Steven Berkoff as Savonarola. The most recent award Raf Vallone achieved is David di Donatello Awards. The upcoming new movie Raf Vallone plays is The First Circle which will be released on Feb 25, 1992.

Raf Vallone was an internationally acclaimed Italian movie star known for his rugged good looks. The athletic Vallone, a former soccer player who often was compared to Burt Lancaster, was born Raffaele Vallone in 1916 in Tropea in Calabria, Italy, the son of a prominent lawyer and his aristocratic wife. At the University of Turin, Vallone took degrees in law and philosophy and then entered his father's law firm.Vallone played semi-professional soccer but never realized his dream of becoming a professional athlete. Subsequently, he became a sports reporter for L'Unita, a communist newspaper, and also a drama critic for La Stampa. During World War II, Vallone served with the anti-Fascist resistance.His first job as a movie actor was a bit part in Nous, les vivants (1942) (aka, "We the Living"), but Vallone was not serious about acting as a career. Hired as a researcher on a film about labor unrest, director Giuseppe De Santis cast Vallone as a soldier competing with Vittorio Gassman for the love of Silvana Mangano in what became the neo-realist classic Riz amer (1949) ("Bitter Rice"). The film propelled Vallone, pronounced a natural actor by De Santis, into international stardom and ended his journalism career.Vallone became a major star in Italy in the 1950s and then a player in the global film industry, making movies in Italian, French and English. Vallone achieved popularity with American audiences in the 1960s, starting with his supporting roles in Deux femmes (1960) ("Two Women") and Le Cid (1961), both co-starring Sophia Loren. Other major actresses he co-starred with on film and stage included Gina Lollobrigida, Anna Magnani, Melina Mercouri, Simone Signoret, and Elena Varzi, to whom he was married for 52 years, until his death in 2002.Vallone's first "American" role was as the incest-minded Italian-American longshoreman Eddie Carbone in Sidney Lumet's film of Arthur Miller's Vu du pont (1962) ("A View from the Bridge"). Other prominent roles in American films included Otto Preminger's Le Cardinal (1963), Roger Corman's L'invasion secrète (1964), Harlow, la blonde platine (1965) starring Carroll Baker, and Henry Hathaway's Nevada Smith (1966).Vallone played many priests during his long career, culminating with the cardinal-confessor of mobster Michael Corleone, a priest who becomes pope and is murdered in Francis Ford Coppola's Le parrain, 3e partie (1990). Appearing for the other side, Vallone was memorable as the Mafia boss Altabani in the original L'or se barre (1969).