A handsome Italian lead who made a career of the moment the handsome man's composure gives way. Antonioni used it in L'Avventura; Leone and the Bond series borrowed it for a baron and a crime boss; we rate the crime boss.
Fi1m perspective
Draco throws a birthday party in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), and his daughter and the man he wants her to marry are both there. Ferzetti plays the crime boss's negotiation with Bond as a joke, and he plays the father's worry underneath it as though it were not one. John Barry's We Have All the Time in the World comes in under the scene, and it is the point in the film where we stopped keeping score against Connery and simply watched. We had come for a gag about a gangster marrying off his daughter and found we minded what happened to him, because Ferzetti never lets the worry leave his face while the lines stay light.
That was his trade long before Bond. Small film parts from 1942, stage work, a first lead in Lo Zappatore (1950) and a romantic lead in The Wayward Wife (1953); then Michelangelo Antonioni cast him twice, as Lorenzo, a struggling artist, in Le Amiche (1955), and as Sandro, a restless, unfulfilled playboy, in L'Avventura (1960). Those two made his name in Italy and then abroad, and they fixed the type: the elegant man in the good suit whose composure does not hold.
We have not reviewed the Antonioni films. The two of his we have written about, a year apart, use that quality in supporting parts. In Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) he is Morton, the tubercular railroad baron, one face among the faces and pauses that give the film its dread; our review did not single him out, and in a film that long and that crowded that is no disgrace. In the Bond film he is the ally and prospective father-in-law, and the warmth is his. One caveat: his English dialogue was often dubbed in international films, this one included, so what we admire in Draco is bearing and expression with another man's voice on top.
He kept working through the 1970s in biblical epics, poliziotteschi and thrillers, with Hans in Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974) the part most often remembered from that decade. Supporting roles carried him into the 2000s, and Luca Guadagnino gave him a late return as Edoardo Recchi Senior in I Am Love (2009). Looking back, he said, "When I was young, I thought that I had wasted my talent because I worried too much about looking good." We are not sure it was wasted. The looking good was half the performance; the other half was showing what it cost.
Start with Draco, which is the easier evening and the one where his kindness shows. Then find L'Avventura, where the same manners are put to a far less kindly use.
Biography
Gabriele Ferzetti (born Pasquale Ferzetti) was an Italian actor who appeared in more than 160 film, television and stage roles between 1942 and 2015. He made his screen debut as a teenager and became a leading man in the 1950s.
Ferzetti trained at the Rome Academy of Dramatic Art after winning a scholarship, though he was later expelled for working professionally. His international breakthrough came with the role of Sandro in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960). He twice won the Nastro d’Argento for Best Supporting Actor, for The Wayward Wife (1953) and We Still Kill the Old Way (1967).
Among his best-known international roles were railroad baron Morton in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Marc Ange Draco in the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), and Edoardo Recchi Senior in Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love (2010). He also appeared as Lot in The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966) and as Hans in The Night Porter (1974). Ferzetti died in Rome on 2 December 2015.
