Aldo Silvani

Aldo Silvani (born January 21, 1891 in Turin , † November 12, 1964 in Milan ) was an Italian actor.

life and career

Aldo Silvani has been on Italian stages since the 1910s, including at the Carro di Tespi between 1929 and 1935 . He played in the classic plays of Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen , among others . He made his film debut in 1934 in Il cardinale Lambertini , directed by Parsifal Bassi . In the three decades that followed, until his death, Silvani remained connected to the cinema and played in over 100 feature films, and from the 1950s onwards he also had over a dozen television roles. Silvani also worked regularly as a voice actor for Italian film versions, for example for Erich von Stroheim in The Great Illusion or Finlay Currie in Quo vadis? .

Aldo Silvani is probably most familiar to today's audience through his film roles. From his early work, the film Lie einer Sommernacht (1942), in which he played Adriana Benetti's father , is particularly important . Directed by Federico Fellini , he played a friendly ringmaster in La Strada - The Song of the Road (1955) and the hypnotist in The Nights of Cabiria (1957). In addition, Silvani worked in supporting roles in several Hollywood films, including Chess the Devil alongside Humphrey Bogart and the adventure film The Valley of the Kings with Robert Taylor . He can also be seen in the epic film Ben Hur , shot in 1959 , but only in a minor supporting role as a man in Nazareth. Until the year he died, Silvani worked as an actor; he had one of his last roles in a film adaptation of Archibald Joseph Cronin's novel The Citadel . He died of cancer at the age of 73.