The Italian mechanic turned actor who gave Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg its open, decent young man, and then spent most of a long career being remembered for it. The face did the work; the singing voice was somebody else's.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Nino Castelnuovo in the garage scenes of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and it may take a while to notice that the singing voice is not his. It was dubbed. What Castelnuovo supplies is the face: a young mechanic in overalls looking at Catherine Deneuve as though nothing in Cherbourg could go wrong. We called his Guy open, decent and not much more than that, and we meant it kindly. He has not lived long enough to be anything else, and the film needs somebody for the years to happen to.
He is not the star of that film and does not try to be. Deneuve carries the look and Michel Legrand's few circling tunes carry the mood, and Castelnuovo's job is to be the person with a wage and an aunt to visit. We found ourselves watching him more than we expected, because while Geneviève is all anticipation, his face keeps registering the cost of things the songs float over. The small flat across town, where Mireille Perrey's Élise waits with Ellen Farner's Madeleine, is his world rather than hers. It is quiet work, and the film's sadness depends on it.
He had been a mechanic and a house painter himself before drama school in Milan, which may be why the overalls sit so well. The debut was a small part in Pietro Germi's The Facts of Murder (1959), followed by a supporting role in Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers (1960) alongside Alain Delon. Then Demy, and then not the career that should have followed. The Reward (1965), A New World (1966) and the spaghetti western Massacre Time (1966) came and went. The part that made him famous at home was Renzo in the television serial I promessi sposi (1967), which we have not seen and will not judge, though it says something that his largest audience found him on the small screen.
The 1970s brought genre films and erotic dramas, Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975) among them, and the title tells you the rest. After that it was mostly Italian television, stage and commercials that made use of his agility. Anthony Minghella brought him back to cinema as D'Agostino in The English Patient (1996). In a Roman television interview in 1999 he said of his countrymen: "We're not very good realists, which makes us very imaginative people."
That is a generous account of a career that handed him one great imaginative object and then not many more. If you want to know what he could do, Cherbourg is the answer, and nearly the whole of it.
Biography
Nino Castelnuovo was an Italian actor of film, stage and television. Born Francesco Castelnuovo on 28 October 1936 in Lecco, he trained at the acting school of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan after working as a mechanic and house painter.
He appeared as Guy Foucher in the musical film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and as D'Agostino in The English Patient (1996). Other films include Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Massacre Time (1966) and A Pain in the Ass (1973). Castelnuovo also worked extensively in Italian television and theatre. He died on 6 September 2021 in Rome.
