The Italian actor Gabriele Ferzetti, who has died aged 90, was never in danger of being typecast. He played a multitude of different film roles in every known genre, over seven decades, and just about the only constant in his long career was that he was perennially handsome and charismatic without being showy.
To cinephiles, he was most memorable for his intense performance of quiet desperation as the unfulfilled wealthy playboy seeking his missing lover in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960). However, his most widely known roles, dubbed into English, were as the unscrupulous railroad baron on crutches in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and as James Bond’s father-in-law, a powerful crime boss, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), the one with George Lazenby as 007.
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