Giancarlo Giannini

Giancarlo Giannini acts with his eyes first. Most of what his face does begins there, a widening or a flicker of calculation, and the rest follows a beat later, so that in close-up you watch a man deciding before you watch him act. It was Lina Wertmüller who saw what that could do, and she filmed him from close enough to catch it for the best part of a decade.

The career before her was ordinary enough: stage work in the early 1960s including productions for Zeffirelli, David Copperfield on television in 1965, a film debut the same year in Libido. Then Wertmüller in 1966, and nine films together. The run that matters is the 1970s: The Seduction of Mimi (1972), Love and Anarchy (1973), Swept Away (1974) opposite Mariangela Melato, Seven Beauties (1975). In these he is her flawed everyman, a man who is funny and pathetic in the same scene and sometimes in the same sentence. He has said "Lina Wertmüller è stata la mia vera maestra", that she was his true teacher, and it is not the sort of thing an actor says about a director who merely photographed him well.

He also had, and has, the ear. He moves between Italian dialects and between languages, and that is what made the second career possible: supporting parts in English-language films, where a European actor with real command of the language is rarer than it should be, and he has stayed working into the 2020s.

For most British viewers that second career means Mathis. In Casino Royale (2006) we did not think to single him out, which tells you the size of the part rather than the quality of the man; the film belonged to Craig and Eva Green and Martin Campbell's action, and Mathis is at the edge of the frame. Quantum of Solace (2008) is where he counts. We were bored by that film and then irritated by it, and the few scenes between Craig and Giannini were the only ones we wanted to go on longer. Craig's Bond has stopped moving his face; Giannini's Mathis keeps moving his, and talks to him as a friend rather than an asset, and it is the nearest the film comes to warmth.

That is the shape of it. The Wertmüller films are where the eyes and the dialects and the comedy are all in use at once; the English-language parts use a fraction of him. Critics have been kind almost without exception, and the only reservation on record is that some of the 1970s films were received with less enthusiasm at home than abroad, Swept Away among them. If you know him only from the Bond films, you have met him at half volume. Go back to the seventies and turn him up.