RIP Umberto Raho

Thin, tall, stately, able to speak perfectly in English and French was perfect for any role. He could be a doctor, a policeman, a lawyer, always bourgeois roles, most often the villain of the first or second lead or one that died tragically at the time of the thriller ....

By Marco Giusti

January 16, 2016

The Italian genre cinema loses another famous character actor, Umberto Raho, 93, also known as Raoul H. Newman, Bert Raho, Raho Humi, Umy Raho, Bob Rains, Robert Rains, Umbert Rau. 120 films, in many roles, thriller, horror, adventure, 007 Italian, western. But also films of great authors, such as John Schlesinger's Darling, Z l’orgia del potere and La confessione by Costa Gavras, The Lady L by Peter Ustinov, The Visit by Bernard Wicki, The Verona Trial of Charles Lizzani.

He had a vast filmography that goes from Ghosts of the Sea by ​​Francesco De Robertis, Romeo and Juliet by Renato Castellani in 1948, was his first film, Lo spettro by Riccardo Freda, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat O'Nine Tails by Dario Argento, Mutande pazze by Roberto D'Agostino and Double Team by Tsui Hark in 1997, which would be his last film.

Thin, tall, stately, able to speak perfectly in English and French, he was perfect for any role. He could play a doctor, a policeman, a lawyer, always bourgeois roles, but most often the villain of the first or second lead or one that died tragically at the time of the thriller.

Besides his best-known films were those shot with Dario Argento, his death on the subjective in The bird is masterful, and the great Italian horror 1960s, Danza macabra, I lungi capelli della morte, straying into science fiction with The Last Man on Earth, alongside Vincet Price, The War of The Planets and Wild, Wild Planet by Antonio Margheriti and the comic horror comic with Satanik by Piero Vivarelli.

Not to mention his roles as a villain in 007 Italian A077 Mission Bloody Mary. But he also starred with Luchino Visconti in Gruppo di famiglia in un interno, with Franco Brusati in Bread and Chocolate, Una vita difficile by Dino Risi and, above all, in Diary of a Schizophrenic by Nelo Risi, where he was for the first time the male lead. He had also done a lot of theater, beginning in 1942 with Minnie la candida of Bontempelli directed by Roger Jacobbi alongside Anna Proclemer and then working with Bragaglia.

And personally I remember in the early 1980s among the protagonists of the last Italian play by Copi with the same author and director. He was born in Sofia, although the encyclopedia written in Bari, in 1922, to an Italian father and Bulgarian mother. He had lived a long time with our real, since the aunt was maid of honor of Queen Elena and, in wartime, remembered he was going to make the line for food dressed as a sissy to get something more.

He studied theater together with Marcello Mastroianni, remembered, which had been a close friend. As had been his friend in the postwar period also Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina. Indeed, he remembered having lent Fellini a dress to get married at a time for all of extreme poverty.

For years he had left Rome to live in a small house in Anzio, where, a little 'svanitello and sick, saying that sometimes visited him his great friend Julie Christie, who had met on the set of Darling. Who knows ...

She had loved working with Ingrid Bergman for The Visit by Bernard Wicki where its role must have been cut with Jean Gabin and La gang dell’Anno Santo. Although old and sick he had been of great spirit and friendliness, very cute and funny.