In his adopted nation of Brazil it was said of Orlando Orfei that, “He is to the circus what Pelé is to football”. Though the Italian-born showman had mastered just about any task to be found under the Big Top from tightrope-walking and stunt-riding to magic tricks, clowning and (the most difficult, he insisted) juggling, it was as an animal-tamer that he was best known.
His signature performance was an elaborate shaving ritual in the lion’s cage using the tail of one of his beasts as the brush. Rather than provoke them into displays of aggression, Orfei stressed how close he was to his wild animals, hugging and kissing them or lying down with up to eight at a time. Anything was possible, he said, as long as you stayed relaxed: “I never treated them like animals, I treated them as friends.”
Born into an Italian circus family that traced its heritage back to a rogue priest who had run off with a gipsy girl in 1822, Orfei claimed to have “sawdust in his blood”. He first entered the ring at five-years-old, hiding in his elder brother’s trousers to emerge as a baby clown. From there, he turned his hand to whatever acts were needed and he was 36 by the time that the departure of the circus’s German animal-trainer thrust him in with the lions.
By then he had already proved his worth to the family business in other ways, introducing a diesel heating system so the performance season could be extended and changing the cotton tents for waterproof plastic. He was also brilliant at promotion, replacing the old handbills with giant billboards, then employing a car playing records of his voice and finally a plane to alert crowds that the circus was in town.
His move to Brazil in 1968, after a visit to the World Circus Festival, was only intended to be temporary. He had arrived at the invitation of a businessman who promptly vanished, leaving Orfei and his company stranded. Spying opportunity in such a vast land, he set up the Circo Nazionale d’Italia Orlando Orfei, and discovered to his relief, “a second Italy”.
Advertisement
While touring continuously, he opened the Tivoli amusement park in Lagoa, south of Rio de Janeiro in 1972. With his Austrian-born wife, Herta, a fellow performer who worked with pigeons, he had a penthouse in the upmarket Sao Conrado area, as well as an apartments in Lagoa and another in Sao Paulo.
His ambition knew no bounds. In the early Eighties, he led his circus on a journey through Latin America, ferrying a convoy of around 100 lorries with performers and animals including four elephants, two polar bears, tigers and lions, plus a plane, across the Amazon and over the Andes.
Over his 40-year career, he was taken to hospital 63 times. An attack by one of his animals left 160 wounds in his chest and another took the middle finger of his right hand. Most trainers, he claimed, gave up after three attacks; he returned, he said, because he knew that in the end, “the guilt was always mine, I could not blame the animals.”
Orlando Orfei was born in 1920 in Riva del Garda, Italy, to Paolo, grandson of the original runaway priest and a famous clown. Orlando and his brother Paris took over the Circo Nazionale Orfei. Most branches of the family ran their own circuses, with competition from the elephant-rider and Italian film star Moira Orfei and the clown Nando (obituary, Nov 3, 2014), who featured in Federico Fellini’s The Clowns (1970) and Amarcord (1973). Orlando featured in films including Last Days of Pompeii (1959) and was photographed on the set of Cleopatra (1963) with Elizabeth Taylor holding one of his cubs or driving around town with a lion in the passenger seat of his convertible. As president of the National Circus Association, he was received by four different popes — John XXIII was a particular fan, inviting him five times.
Orfei and Herta had six children, some of whom followed him into the trade. His second son Mario took charge of the Dancing Fountains, a show of synchronised water jets.
Advertisement
By the 1990s, he was forced to rebuff criticism of his use of animals, saying, “They do not know the lack of freedom, because they were born in the cage. I doubt that Julius Caesar suffered because he had no car.”
After suffering a stroke, he closed the circus in 2003 and lived modestly in a suburb of Rio, Nova Iguaçu. In 2012, he was honoured by President Dilma Rousseff with the Ordem do Mérito Cultural, an award for his contribution to Brazilian culture. He was not impressed with the new breed of circuses; he said that his wife, who survives him, had fallen asleep when she went to see Cirque de Soleil.
Orlando Orfei, circus performer, was born on July 8, 1920. He died on August 1, 2015, aged 95