Saturdays with the Stars: Franco Nero

Each month of 2023 we are taking a look at a star who made their name in westerns, rustling cattle & riding horses during the brief time when cowboys ruled Hollywood.  Last month, we celebrated John Wayne, the quintessential Hollywood western star and one of the most iconic figures of Classical Hollywood.  For the remainder of the year, we will move beyond Classical Hollywood, and indeed, beyond the "heyday" of the Hollywood western into New Hollywood, when the genre would undergo radical transformations in the late 1960's and throughout the 1970's, adapting and eventually falling out-of-fashion.  This month, we'll start this conversation about New Hollywood with a man who would become synonymous with one of the greatest spaghetti westerns of all-time, and then go on to have an unusual career that, despite not being a vocalist, would lead to a key role in one of the last important musicals of the 1960's and eventually feature a part as a key villain in a major action franchise.  This month's star is Franco Nero.

Born Francesco Clemente Giuseppe Sparanero to an Italian military family, Nero started acting in his early twenties, and as luck would have it, he'd get a big break at the age of 25 in his first leading role.  We'll talk a little bit this month about why spaghetti westerns became a thing, but Nero was actually Italian (unlike people like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson who came to Italy from Hollywood to make movies), and became an icon with Django in 1966.  This film would spawn dozens of ripoffs, including a sequel decades later, and decades after that, Nero would have a brief cameo in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, a film inspired by his movie (but not related to it at all other than the name & Nero's participation).  We'll be watching Django this month, as it is the most important film of Nero's career.

But Nero would go on to have a bizarre career in Hollywood.  Though English was his second language, just a year later, he'd star in the Warner Brothers' production of Camelot opposite Richard Harris & Julie Andrews, and would become a well-regarded character actor throughout the 1970's & 80's.  This month, we're going to look at his unusual career, and talk about how Nero would go down as one of the spaghetti western's most successful crossover stars.