RIP Lando Buzzanca

 

Farewell to the “male blackbird” Lando Buzzanca

 

Italy 24

By Richard

December 18, 2022

 

Lando Buzzanca, the actor who more than anyone else played the Italian male ‘sciupafemmine’, died today at the age of 87. For a couple of years he had been suffering from a disabling disease that had compromised his mental and cognitive faculties and for a few weeks, after the fracture of his femur, he had been hospitalized in the Gemelli hospital.

His son Massimo Buzzanca confirmed the news of his disappearance:“Yesterday I came to see him – he told Adnkronos – and I think he recognized me because he wanted to get up. I convinced him to stay in bed. Of course, his conditions weren’t the best, but I hoped that at least this Christmas would pass with us. When they called me to tell me that he had gotten worse, I was leaving the house to visit him, but I arrived late”.

The difficult adolescence of Lando Buzzanca

Gerlando Buzzanca, known as Lando, was born in Palermo on August 24, 1935 into a family of artists. Uncle was an actor, while his father was a projectionist. Since he was a child, Nando has been fascinated by the world of cinema and, at the age of 8, he expresses his desire to pursue an acting career to his father, but in response he receives a resounding slap. Not demoralized at all, Lando, around the age of 16-17, moved to Rome to attend the Sharoff Academy of Dramatic Art and, at the same time, adapted to doing even the humblest jobs. These were difficult years and the aspiring Sicilian actor even decides to prostitute himself and thus satisfy the desires of the Roman forty-year-olds.“Once I was chosen by a cross-eyed lady, but with a body of disarming beauty. After making love, when I was looking for an excuse to pocket the money and leave, while trying to leave the hotel room she took me to, she pulled out a gun. I said to myself: ‘If you want to be an actor, you have to get out of this scam’. After further discussions with her, I pocketed the 300 lire and definitively archived that kind of experience”, Buzzanca will reveal to ilGiornaleOff.it.

The 70s, Lando Buzzanca becomes The male blackbird

In 1956 he married Lucia Peralta with whom he had two sons, Massimiliano and Mario Buzzanca. In 1959 he was taken for an extra role in the blockbuster Ben Hur. Two years later comes the turning point in his professional career when Pietro Germi chooses him before him for the role of Rosario Mulè in the film Italian divorce and, then, in 1964 for the film Seduced and abandoned. Also in 1964 he was a supporting actor in the drama film Without sun or moon, while three years later it was the director Alberto Lattuada who wanted him for the film Don Giovanni in Sicily, taken from the homonymous novel by the writer Vitaliano Brancati. From that moment on Buzzanca was engaged in a whole series of sexy Italian comedies in which he played the part of the great seducer. “Thanks to those films I bought the villa by the sea. And, in any case, even in those parts there were less trivial implications than one might think. The feminists hated me, but a weak man emerged, dominated by women.” Buzzanca will say. The film that determines its international consecration is The blackbird male of 1971, directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile. “The Male Blackbird was a useless man. He only realizes he’s someone when everyone is looking at him because he has a beautiful wife,” the actor will explain who, after having achieved ever greater success at the box office, decides to make a more accurate selection of films in which to act. “Adam and Eve proposed to me, Fenech and I had to stand on stage naked with a fig leaf in front of it: it was really too much, I said no”will say the Sicilian actor who in 1970 also enjoyed great success on television with the program Mr and Mrspaired with Delia Scala.

After starring in films such as The referee, the trade unionist and The Honorable likes women, is slowly being pushed aside due to his political views of right. “When I had to play in the theater in the red provinces I couldn’t get in. In Savona they had to change the company because they didn’t want me. And in Bologna, I performed in a private theatre”Buzzanca will reveal that he sees in the right the guarantor of some values, very dear to him such as“order, family, merit”. With the advent of the Second Republic he will have words of esteem towards Silvio Berlusconi: “With all the quarrels that are heard around him, it was politics that took away a lot of his money. To defend himself he had to spend 480 million on lawyers. Who cares if he fucks, he’s divorced! They hate him because he is a successful man ”. On the occasion of the 2006 Politics, however, he declared his willingness to vote An in the Chamber and DS in the Senate to help his friend Gianni Borgna get elected (but his support was not enough). The following year, then, he casts his vote in favour Walter Veltroni at the head of the Capitol:“I remain a man of the right, but in Rome I vote for Veltroni: an intellectual of European stature”. In more recent times, speaking of the leader of the League Matteo Salvini, he will say: “He’s intelligent, that’s why they want to kill him. But he is one who speaks saying serious things: when he stopped the ships it was because he couldn’t stand it anymore, he was exaggerating. We help people but not everyone: we can’t have seven hundred million people entering a country, they’re eating Italy from us!”.

From returning to TV to depression over the death of his wife

Buzzanca’s professional career, after a few years in the theater, revived in 2005 when the Sicilian actor starred in the Raiuno fiction My son which tells the story of Commissioner Vivaldi, the father of a homosexual boy and for this reason he receives quite a few criticisms from the center-right. In 2007 Buzzanca received the Golden Globe for Best Actor and a nomination for the David di Donatello for his portrayal of Prince Giacomo Uzeda in the film The Viceroys by Roberto Faenza, based on the homonymous novel by Federico De Roberto. In 2010, after more than 50 years of marriage, his wife Lucia died of an incurable disease. “I was a shitty man, because as soon as I found a woman capable of letting me live a moment or a day together, I went there. But then I always came home because I loved my wife, I really loved her”, admits the actor who , after the death of his wife, he experiences a great period depression.

In 2013, despite a renewed appreciation from the television audience that follows him with pleasure in fiction The restorer Buzzanca attempts suicide.“When we met she was not yet 18 and I was 20, we grew up in love. After her death I had everything ready, I had filled the tub with hot water, I was ready to cut my wrists. My sons Mario and Massimiliano stopped me”he will reveal in 2014. Two years later Buzzanca begins a romantic relationship with the journalist Frances Della Valle40 years younger than him and, again in 2016, he resumed working by participating as a competitor in the program Dancing with the Stars paired with Sara Mardegan. Instead, the film is from 2017 Who will save the roses? in which he and Carlo Delle Piane play the role of an elderly gay couple.

In April 2021 Buzzanca, now 85 years old, was hospitalized in the Santo Spirito hospital in Rome after falling at home and suffering a head injury. After about a month, Francesca Della Valle accuses her family (who deny her) of not allowing her to have news of her boyfriend. The sons Massimiliano and Mario, after the ischemia that struck his father in 2014 causing him aphasia, chose to appoint a support administrator who would take care of managing the family assets. A choice that, already in 2019, had been strongly criticized by the person concerned: “They want to make me look stupid, they want to sell my beautiful house and they want to put someone next to me to manage my money and my assets. I don’t deserve to end like this”Buzzanca had told the weekly Moreover. The actor, in November 2022, at the age of 87, falls from his wheelchair into the RSA where he had been a guest for some time and is hospitalized at the Gemelli polyclinic in Rome.

BUZZANCA, Lando (Gerlando Buzzanca)

Born: 8/24/1935, Palermo, Sicily, Italy

Died: 12/18/2022, Rome, Lazio, Italy

 

Lando Buzzanca’s westerns – actor:

For a Few Dollars Less – 1966 (Bill)

Rebels on the Loose – 1966 (Private Chester/Ringo)

The Beast – 1970 (stagecoach driver)