Fans of Italian cinema mourn the death of Gabriele Ferzetti, one of Italy's greatest screen actors. Active since the fascist era, Ferzetti earned comparisons to an Italian Olivier with a variety of challenging, memorable roles. Cineastes appreciate his roguish playboy in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura and crime boss in Elio Petri's We Still Kill the Old Way. He also scored a memorable performance playing a commissar in Costa-Gavras's The Confession. International viewers probably remember his turn as affable mobster (and James Bond's father-in-law) Marc Ange Draco in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.But I'll always remember Ferzetti for his wonderful performance in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Playing the crippled railroad boss Morton, he's a curiously European presence in this mythic Western, an aristocrat decaying from "tuberculosis of the bones" and driven to complete his railroad before death. Like an exile from a Visconti film, Ferzetti invests the film with an improbable sense of tragedy; though he's the villain, his rivalry with Henry Fonda's psychotic Frank and pitiful death scene command add unexpected grace notes to Leone's masterpiece.
