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Carlo Romano (1908-1975) was an Italian actor in film, vaudeville, radio and television. He was also a highly active voice actor.

Born in Livorno in 1908, Carlo Romano was the son of actress Dina Romano (1888-1957) and younger brother of Felice Romano, actor as well. He started at the Teatro Minimo in Trieste when he was only five. In 1929 he entered the Compagnia Talli-Capodaglio, while during the war he was active in vaudeville. Because of his young age and his style, which was theatrical and personal, expressing sympathy and warmth, he was nicknamed Carletto (little Charles), a name that stuck on him. In 1933 Romano married actress Jone Bolghero (1898-1979), but the couple divorced afterwards.

In cinema Carlo Romano started in 1934 with an uncredited part as a taxi driver in La signora di tutti (Max Ophuls). After years of small parts, his roles slowly became bigger towards the end of the decade, playing mostly in comedies by Guido Brignone, Mario Bonnard and others. When performing in dramas he was still often the comical sidekick. Romano was the protagonist of the comedies Il socio invisibile (Roberto Roberti 1939), co-starring Clara Calamai, Un marito per il mese di aprile (Giorgio SImonelli 1941) but more often he had supprting roles. In the years 1939-1943 he was highly active and played in some 35 films. From those years, Romano is best remembered for his participations in Cavalleria rusticana (Amleto Palermi 1939), in which his mother also performed and he was Bammulu, Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Alessandro Blasetti 1942), in which he was the reckless bus driver Antonio, and I pagliacci (Giuseppe Fatigati 1942) a Beniamino Gigli vehicle in which Romano played composer Ruggero Leoncavallo. In the postwar era Romano would play in some 55 films more, among which Campane a martello (Luigi Zampa 1949) with Gina Lollobrigida, Domani e troppo tardi (Leonide Peguy 1950) starring Pier Angeli, Il cardinale Lambertini (Giorgio Pastina 1954) starring Gino Cervi, and the Aldo Fabrizi drama Accadde al penitenziario (Giorgio Bianchi 1955). A highlight after the war was Romano’s part as lawyer Enzo La Rosa in the tragicomedy Luci del varieta/Variety Lights (Alberto Lattuada/Federico Fellini 1950), about a young golddigger girl (Carla Del Poggio), who uses the head of a second-rate theatrical group (Peppino de Filippo) to launch her career. With Lattuada Romano continued in La spiaggia, with Fellini in I vitelloni, both from 1953. In the latter Romano is Michele Curti, the owner of a shop in religious articles. He takes on skirt chaser Fausto (Franco Fabrizi) whose father-in-law is his friend, but fires him when Fausto tries to seduce Curti’s wife (Lida Baarova) during the carnival. Later on Fausto steals a statue from Curti and tries to sell it to a monk. La spiaggia was one of the first films shot in Ferraniacolor. It was a drama about a woman (Martine Carol) who is celebrated and then rejected by the local high society of a fashionable seaside village, when it is discovered she was a prostitute.

In addition to acting, Romano was even more active in dubbing. During the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, he gave his voice to numerous foreign and Italian actors, enriching them with caricature-like airs and when necessary with dialects. Among those whose Italian voice he was, were Fred Astaire, James Cagney, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Fernandel (Romano was his voice in the Italian versions of all the Don Camillo films), Lou Costello (known in Italy as Pinotto), Peter Lorre, Ernest Borgnine, Peter Ustinov and in later stages Eli Wallach, Rod Steiger and Jason Robards in the spaghetti westerns. For Disney he dubbed Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio (1940), the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland (1951), the Secretary Bird in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood (1973). In The Wonderful World of Puss ‘n Boots (1969) by Toei he gave voice to the cat Pero.

Romano also often worked in TV, from the mid-1950s on. In 1956 was co-author with Bruno Corbucci of the children TV series Il marziano Filippo, one of the first TV miniseries produced for the new Rai - Radiotelevisione Italiana. In 1959 he was in the cast of Il Mattatore, TV program with Vittorio Gassman and in 1963 he played Luigi Paterno in Peppino Girella, TV series by Eduardo De Filippo and Isabella Quarantotti. On TV he turned his characters in loveable and sympathetic persons, such as Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield (1965). Romano was also active for dubbing on television, as the Italian voice of Alfred Hitchcock, Henry Calvin, Sergeant Garcia in Zorro, next to dubbing Nick Carter, the TV comics by Bonvi and Guido De Maria from the 1970s, and Signor Rossi in the episodic feature Il Signor Rossi cerca la felicita. Romano had an even bigger career in radio, playing in various radio dramas such as La domenica della buona gente by Pratolini and Giagni, 1952, directed by Majano, who also direct

Glenn Ford
A studio star who moved effortlessly across genres in long
and productive career

The hairstyles signposted Glenn Ford's long and active career; from the full and
wavy to the sleek, dark gigolo look, to the short back and sides, to a severe
crewcut that gradually shrivelled like dry grass on the prairie. His face, that
began boyish in prewar B films, hovered somewhere between the rugged
handsomeness of William Holden and Tom Ewell's Thurberesque one, allowing him to
be extremely dour in films noirs or to display the righteous nobility of a lone
western hero, while also being able to play perplexed characters in comedies.
For Ford, who has died aged 90, was a versatile Hollywood star able to shift
genres while retaining his sincere screen persona. Although his realistic speech
and timing seemed to owe something to the Method - he often had a mumbled and
hesitant delivery - the closest he ever came to the Actors' Studio was as Marlon
Brando's co-star in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956).
Born in Quebec of Welsh descent, he was the son of a railroad executive and mill
owner, the nephew of Sir John MacDonald, a former prime minister of Canada.
Another Ford kinsman was Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United
States. Ford had tried a variety of jobs, becoming interested in the theatre,
and was acting on stage in California when he was signed to a contract with
Columbia Pictures in 1939.
At the beginning of his career he was in a number of undistinguished B pictures
- an exception being John Cromwell's anti-Nazi drama So Ends Our Night (1941) -
but the films improved and Ford stayed with the studio until the mid-1950s. This
period was interrupted by war service in the US marines, part of his activities
consisting in the training of French Resistance fighters. (He later became a
commander in the US naval reserves and served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968.)
Matured from his war experiences, Ford, and millions of hot-blooded men all over
the world, lusted after gorgeous Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946), as she peeled
off her long black gloves in a symbolic striptease while singing Put the Blame
on Mame. The sexual chemistry between the two stars was so strong on the set
that Columbia mogul Harry Cohn, who considered Hayworth his private property,
had microphones hidden in her dressing room in case she started an affair with
her leading man. But they quickly found the mics and teased the eavesdropping
boss with risque conversations.
At the time, Ford was married to leggy, toothy dancer Eleanor Powell, who
retired from the screen to become plain Mrs Glenn Ford in 1943. (They divorced
in 1959.) Yet Cohn paired Hayworth and Ford again in the listless and Bizet-less
The Loves of Carmen (1948), in which Rita was a sexy Gypsy to Ford's stiff Don
Jose, and also in Affair in Trinidad (1952), another exotic melodrama.
Among Ford's best films at Columbia were the two he made for Fritz Lang. In The
Big Heat (1953), the audience is made to discover and experience the events
subjectively as Ford's cop does, while he mercilessly conducts a retributive
investigation into the death of his wife in a car bomb explosion. Ford's
achievement was in the creation of a cold and calculating yet sympathetic
character, who permits himself some warmth on the death of the pathetic
gangster's moll (Gloria Grahame).
In the same team's Human Desire (1954), an updating of Zola's La Bete Humaine,
already filmed by Jean Renoir in 1938, Ford's steely passivity allowed the other
performances to bounce off him effectively.
In 1955, he gained a crewcut and went over to MGM, where he made an immediate
impact in The Blackboard Jungle as a novice New York schoolteacher confronted
with a class of hooligans. It was also the film which effectively launched Bill
Haley's Rock Around the Clock on the world. Ford's pipe-smoking intensity suited
the liberal worthiness of the picture, as did his lawyer defending a Mexican boy
accused of rape and murder in Trial, of the same year.
Ford then switched successfully to comedy as the affable, ineffectual occupation
army officer Fishy in The Teahouse of the August Moon, trying to bring
American-style democracy to Okinawa, but who goes native himself, and the
bumbling navy PR man trying to do likewise on a South Pacific island in Don't Go
Near the Water (1957).
At the same time, Ford made three Delmer Davies westerns. There was the brooding
Jubal (1956), in which he inspires the Othello-like jealousy of Ernest Borgnine;
3.10 to Yuma (1957), in one of his rare villain parts, and Cowboy (1958), as
Jack Lemmon's tough, drunken partner.
At his busiest in the 1950s and 1960s, Ford moved smoothly from the serious
rodeo drama The Violent Men (1955) and the horse opera The Fastest Gun Alive
(1956) to the biopic operatics of Interrupted Melody (1955) as the husband of a
Wagnerian soprano stricken with polio, to the comedy western The Sheepman (1958)
oppos