BUD SPENCER

(31 October 1929 - 27 June 2016)

Bud Spencer, a former champion swimmer and Olympic water polo player, was an Italian actor (born Carlo Pedersoli) who, like his regular co-star Terence Hill (born Mario Girotti) assumed an American sounding name in order to enter the US and European film markets – Bud after Budweiser and Spencer after Tracy. His career was mostly geared to cowboy films, the oft-named spaghetti western or pizza oater movie genre. His first (uncredited) film appearance was in an Italian comedy, Quel fantasma di mio marito (1950). He then appeared in Quo Vadis, the 1951 MGM epic filmed in Italy, after which he was in many minor movies but with little success until his change of name in the late 1960s when he began working with Terence Hill in such titles as Ace High, The Black Pirate, They Call Me Trinity and its many sequels. Not all his films reached the UK, but among those that did were Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Watch Out We’re Mad and The Night Before Christmas (directed by Hill). For the rest of his career Spencer relied on more westerns and the Flatfoot films with him playing Inspector Flatfoot, until Italian television cast him in series such as Big Man (as Jack Clementi), Extralarge (as private eye Jack ‘Extralarge’ Costello), We Are Angels, a prison break comedy, and Recipe for Crime (2010), with Bud as a chef, one of his final roles. In his time he also trained as an air pilot and formed his own air transport company and later on a children’s clothing firm. In 2005 he turned to politics, standing for the Forzia Italia party, but without ever getting into power.

MICHAEL DARVELL