In the garden of his villa by the sea at Circeo, a man of talent, culture, and sensitivity sat before Donatella Baglivo. Raf Vallone: footballer, partisan, journalist, actor. A worthy heir to that millennial culture his native Calabria had placed at his disposal.

Born in Tropea in 1916, he moved as a child to Turin with his family. He graduated in both Literature and Law under the guidance of masters such as Luigi Einaudi and Leone Ginzburg. Meanwhile he played football for Torino, winning the Coppa Italia in 1936. Then came the war, the Resistance in the ranks of the Action Party, and a hair-raising escape through the freezing waters of Lake Como to evade deportation to Germany.

After the war he became a journalist, editing the culture pages of L’Unità. But fate had other plans. Giuseppe De Santis discovered him and cast him in Bitter Rice alongside Silvana Mangano and Vittorio Gassman. It was 1949: from that moment it was one success after another. Pietro Germi wanted him for The Path of Hope, on whose set he met Elena Varzi, who would become his wife for fifty years. Curzio Malaparte called him “the only Marxist face in Italian cinema” and cast him in The Forbidden Christ.

International recognition came with Sidney Lumet’s A View from the Bridge, adapted from the Arthur Miller drama that Vallone had brought triumphantly to the Parisian stage for over 580 performances. A David di Donatello, an Oscar nomination. Then El Cid with Sophia Loren, Two Women with De Sica, and finally the cardinal who hears Michael Corleone’s confession in Coppola’s The Godfather Part III.

The leading actor of great and successful films remained a simple and captivating man, because he knew how to live through his season of glory without surrendering his poetic humanity.