Paolo Stoppa spent fifty years as the third or fourth name on Italian cast lists, a rasping, ironic presence. In the one scene we can vouch for, he turns a papal audience into a market haggle, and it is the funniest thing in the film.
Fi1m perspective
Halfway through Becket (1964), Richard Burton's archbishop is taken away from Peter O'Toole's Henry and the film goes quiet with him. Then it reaches Pope Alexander III and Cardinal Zambelli, played by Paolo Stoppa and Gino Cervi, and the two of them haggle over Becket like traders over a catch. Peter Glenville's film is handsome and talky and slow through its second half, and this is one of only two moments when it gets up and moves. We laughed, properly, and the reason is Stoppa's decision to play the Pope not as a holy man weighing a soul but as a man weighing a price. It is a small scene. It is one of the liveliest in the film.
That is what he did, and he did it for a long time. He came from the Rome stage, where he began in 1927, went into films in the early 1930s and spent that decade and the next in comedies. After the war he formed a theatre partnership with his wife, Rina Morelli, and the director Luchino Visconti, and Visconti and Vittorio De Sica gave him his best film parts: Rappi in Miracle in Milan (1951), Cerri in Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Don Calogero Sedara in The Leopard (1963). He made around 194 films before stopping in 1983, and in between he dubbed American actors into Italian, which tells you something about the voice.
In Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) he is Sam, and the honest thing to say is that we did not single him out. Leone's film is 166 minutes of faces, pauses and Ennio Morricone, and it does not want a character actor to be busy. It wants him to be there, and he is.
The reservation, and it is barely one, is that he was a character player and never a lead, so his best work sits inside other people's films, in scenes rather than in whole performances. We have not reviewed The Leopard, so we will not judge Don Calogero Sedara at length, but it is the part people name first and the one to seek out. Start with Becket, wait for the cardinals, and watch him work out what an archbishop is worth.
Biography
Paolo Stoppa (6 June 1906 – 1 May 1988) was an Italian actor and dubber. Born in Rome, he began his stage career in 1927 and appeared in films from 1932. He is best known for his work with director Luchino Visconti, alongside his wife, actress Rina Morelli.
His notable film roles include Cerri in Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Don Calogero Sedara in The Leopard (1963), Sam in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Pope Alexander III in Becket (1964). Stoppa also worked extensively as a voice dubber for Italian releases of films starring actors such as Fred Astaire, Richard Widmark and Kirk Douglas.
