NINO CASTELNUOVO

(28 October 1936 - 6 September 2021)

The Italian actor Nino Castelnuovo, who has died aged 84, was in films from 1956, including Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers (1959). However, he will be best remembered for playing the car mechanic Guy opposite Catherine Deneuve as Genevieve in Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). On paper it was a film that should not have worked as it went against the rules of how to make a movie. With its sung-through dialogue it resembled a filmed opera, but with Demy's extraordinary skill as a director coupled with Michel Legrand's romantic score, it captured the hearts of filmgoers everywhere and won many awards including the Prix Louis-Delluc and the Palme d'Or at Cannes and was nominated in five categories of the Academy Awards, although it won none. Deneuve and Castelnuovo were both beautiful and charming actors who lit up the simple love story.
Nino was born Francesco Castelnuovo in Lombardy and after a few menial jobs he moved to Milan, joined an acting school making his debut as a mime artist. He did some work with Disney on television, but his real breakthrough came with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. He was successful on Italian television in I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) about the 17th-century Spanish war in Lombardy, and several other TV series. Most of his film work was made in Italy, although he occasionally did movies with a more international appeal such as Serge Bourguinon's Western The Reward (1965) with Max Von Sydow and Yvette Mimieux, Vittorio De Sica's A New World (1966) with Sean Connery, Agnes Varda's The Creatures (1966) with Deneuve and Michel Piccoli, Pasquale Festa Campanile's On My Way to the Crusades I Met a Girl Who... (1967) with Tony Curtis and Monica Vitti, Radley Metzger's Camille 2000 (1969), The 5-Man Army (1969) with Peter Graves and Bud Spencer, L'Emmerdeur (1973) with Lino Ventura, and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996). Otherwise, in a sixty-year career, it was mainly Italian TV films and series and some stage work. Castelnuovo's last film was the sports-related crime thriller The Legacy Run in 2016. He was married first to the actress Danila Trebbi, who bore his son Lorenzo, and then to Maria Cristina Di Nicola from 2010 until his death.

MICHAEL DARVELL