The Italian film and stage actor Franco Interlenghi, who has died aged 83, will be remembered for two masterpieces of postwar Italian cinema. He was the elder of the two Roman urchins in Vittorio De Sica’s Sciuscià (Shoeshine, 1946) and went on to be the semiautobiographical Moraldo in Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni – big calves, or loafers (1953). In this he played the youngest of the band of provincial layabouts and the only good-looking one, who at the end of the film decides to quit the Adriatic seaside resort, intended to be Rimini (though it was not actually filmed in that town, Fellini’s birthplace, which he left for Rome in search of a more interesting future). This character would evolve into Marcello in La Dolce Vita, played by Marcello Mastroianni, with whom Interlenghi had acted on stage in Luchino Visconti’s impressive production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
Born in Rome into a lower-middle-class family, when he heard a film director was looking for young boys for a film, Franco, then 15, liked the possibility of earning some extra pocket money, and went to the audition, joining the queue of hopeful lads. When De Sica saw him and asked if he liked boxing and had experience of it, the honest youth replied no, and was dismissed. But he queued up again. And this time, when asked the same question, he replied that he was indeed an enthusiastic boxer. He got the part.
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