Nino Manfredi was probably the best-loved Italian comic actor of his generation. Vittorio Gassman was perhaps more technically gifted, while Alberto Sordi had more presence, but in the 100 or so films that he made, it was Manfredi who best reflected how the Italians saw themselves.
His stock in trade at the peak of his success in the late 1950s and early 1960s was the crafty wheeler-dealer or small-time crook, living on his wits and taking advantage of the country’s postwar boom. His roles at this time included that of the would-be fraudster who passes himself off as a paratrooper to impress the girls in Guardia, Ladro e Cameriera (1958), directed by Dino Risi, and the four parts he took for the same director in the episodic comedy Vedo Nudo (1969).
Yet he was perhaps more impressive playing the melancholy obverse of this type, the little man buffeted by circumstance who has to put a brave face on things, as in another of the six films he made with Risi, Straziami, ma di baci saziami (1966), and as the immigrant struggling to find acceptance in Switzerland in Pane e cioccolato (1974), the masterpiece of the years of the commedia all’italiana. The humour he conveyed here had its foundations not in the grotesque to which his contemporaries often resorted but in the irony of Pirandello, whose works had first formed him as an actor.
He was born Saturnino Manfredi in 1921 in Castro dei Volsci, near Frosinone, southeast of Rome. From boyhood he was enthralled by acting, using his mother’s blankets as the curtains of a theatre in which he performed for his family. His father, a farmer, did not share his enthusiasm, and to placate him he studied law at university. Then, however, he went to theatre school in Rome, beginning his career on the stages of Milan and the capital, mainly in Shakespeare and Pirandello.
By the start of the 1950s he was finding work, too, in dubbing and on the radio, and had made his cinema debut in Torna a Napoli (1949). He appeared regularly on screen throughout the Fifties, for example as an amateur gangster in Susanna tutta Panna (1957) and as a gondolier engaged in amorous competition with Sordi in Venezia, la luna e tu (1958).
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His first substantial success came in L’impiegato (1959), as the frustrated employee of the title who creates a Walter Mitty-ish alter ego. He followed this with, among other notable films, Il giudizio universale (1961), for Vittorio De Sica, and Questa volta parliamo di uomini (“Let’s Talk About Men”, 1965), directed by Lina Wertmuller.
Another hit was the costume drama Nell’Anno del Signore (1969), which teamed him once more with Sordi, and with Claudia Cardinale.
There are fewer barriers in Italy than in Britain between film and television stardom, and throughout the 1960s Manfredi maintained a parallel career as the host of popular Saturday night shows, and lodged himself firmly in the collective Italian consciousness with a recurring sketch in which he played a barista, the person who makes coffee in an Italian bar. In 1972 he created a poignant Geppetto, the maker of Pinocchio, for what is agreed to be the best television version of Collodi’s tale.
His films in the Seventies included Girolimoni, il mostro da Roma (1972), in which he gave a fine performance as an innocent man suspected of being a child-killer. He also made C’eravamo Tanti Amati (1975), with Gassman, for the director Ettore Scale, and the following year played a vile paterfamilias in Brutti, sporchi e cattivi. Earlier in the decade, he had turned his hand to directing with Per grazia ricevuta (“Between Miracles”, 1970), which won the Best First Film prize at Cannes that year.
Latterly he had appeared in several of the police dramas that are the staple fare of Italian television, and last year he played the Spanish writer Lorca in his final film, La luz prodigiosa, directed by Miguel Hermoso.
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He had been ill for some time after a stroke, and the lifetime achievement award given to him at the 2003 Venice Film Festival had to be collected by his wife, Erminia. She survives him, as do their two daughters and their son, the director Luca Manfredi.
Nino Manfredi, actor, was born on March 22, 1921. He died on June 4, 2004, aged 83.