Terence Hill, guest star

Many know actor and director Hill but not many are aware his real name is Mario Girotti and that he was born in Venice in 1939.  The Festival is screening the film he made with Damiano Damiani, A Genius, Two Friends and an Idiot, and one he made with Tonino Valerii, My Name is Nobody (Il mio nome è nessuno), both of them produced by Sergio Leone.

His mother was German, his father Italian and he lived as a child in Lommatzsch, in Germany, where the family survived the Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II before moving to Rome.

Director Dino Risi spotted him at a swimming competition there in 1951 when he was 12 and offered him a small part in his film Vacation with a Gangster. After appearing in 27 films in Italy, including Luchino Visconti's The Leopard in 1963, he returned to Germany and made adventure films and Westerns based on the work of German novelist Karl May.  He went back to Italy in 1967 to play in Giuseppi Colizzi's Blood River (Dio perdona... Io no!, 1968), where he met Carlo Pedersoli (Bud Spencer) and changed his name to Terence Hill.

He played in many action films and Westerns alongside Spencer and the pair were a hit in B-films in Italy and elsewhere.  His most famous films are the Western My Name is Trinity (Lo chiamavano Trinità, 1970) and its 1972 sequel Trinity is Still My Name (Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità).  He teamed up with Henry Fonda in 1973 in Valerii's My Name is Nobody and also directed and starred in Lucky Luke in 1991.

See Hill's website