Rossano Brazzi Biography
Born: September 18, 1916
Died: December 24, 1994
Bologna-born Rosanno Brazzi abandoned his law studies at San Marco University when his parents were killed by fascists. Becoming an actor, Brazzi rapidly rose to matinee-idol status after his film debut in 1939; but while making faces before the Mussolini-controlled cameras by day, he was tirelessly active in the Resistance by night. He made his first Hollywood film, Little_Women, in 1949, but it was his multi-hued portrayal of the impotent Count Vincenzo Toriato-Faurini in The_Barefoot_Contessa (1954) that won him international stardom. He went on to play such suave Europeans as Renato di Rossi in Summertime (1955) and Emile DeBecque in South_Pacific (1958), after which his film roles tended to become routine and repetitive. An occasional visitor to television after his first small-screen appearance on a 1960 episode of The June Allyson Show, Brazzi was a regular on the Harold_Robbins-created series The Survivors (1969), playing Onassis clone Antaeus Riakos. Turning to directing in the mid-1960s (sometimes under the nom de film of Edward Ross), Brazzi's best-known effort in this capacity was the modest family-oriented film The_Christmas_That_Almost_Wasn't (1966). From 1940 to 1981, Rosanno Brazzi was the husband of actress Lidia Bartalini; after her death, he married another actress, Ilse Fischer. Hal Erickson, Rovi
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