Rossano Brazzi

Rossano Brazzi (born 18 September 1916 in Bologna, Kingdom of Italy) was an Italian actor, film director and screenwriter whose career spanned more than five decades. He first trained as a stage performer and worked as a lawyer before making his cinematic debut in 1939, quickly becoming a matinee idol in Italian cinema. Over the 1940s he appeared in a string of successful films such as Tosca (1941), We the Living (1942) and The Black Eagle (1946), establishing a reputation for elegance and charm. After World War II he continued to dominate the Italian screen, starring in a variety of genres from historical epics to melodramas, and even worked briefly in Germany on Back Then (1943). In the early 1950s Brazzi moved to Hollywood, where his breakthrough role in the English‑language hit Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) brought him international fame. He followed this success with memorable performances opposite Katharine Hepburn in Summertime (1955), Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), and in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific (1958). Throughout the 1960s he alternated between European productions and American projects, appearing in classics such as The Italian Job (1969) and Light in the Piazza (1962). In addition to acting, he occasionally wrote and directed films under the pseudonym Edward Ross, displaying his versatile talent behind the camera. Brazzi’s personal life was marked by two long marriages—to baroness Lidia Bertolini (1940‑1981) and later to Ilse Fischer (married 1984)—and he fathered a son, George Llewellyn Brady, born in 1955. He died in Rome on 24 December 1994, reportedly from a neural virus, leaving behind a legacy of romantic elegance that continues to influence portrayals of the sophisticated leading man.