Franco Nero

Francesco Clemente Giuseppe Sparanero was born 23 November 1941 and took the name Franco Nero into a film industry exploding with genre. Django in 1966 made him an icon overnight, the coffin-dragging gunslinger who defined the Spaghetti Western's brutal style. Through the '60s and '70s he moved fluidly across Italy's genre boom - polizieschi, gialli, Westerns - while also landing Hollywood: Camelot in 1967, where he met Vanessa Redgrave, began a relationship that lasted decades before they married in 2006, and fathered actor Carlo Gabriel Nero in 1969. The roles kept coming in wild variety: Force 10 from Navarone, Enter the Ninja, Die Hard 2, a voice in Cars 2, a return alongside Redgrave in Letters to Juliet, a callbacks in John Wick: Chapter 2 and The Pope's Exorcist. Over 200 films, an international career built on the willingness to go anywhere the camera pointed.