Adolfo Celi

Adolfo Celi was born in Sicily and appeared in close to a hundred films, most of them Italian, but the international audience knows one face: Emilio Largo, the eyepatch, the shark pool, the unhurried villain of Thunderball. That is the small tragedy of the export market. At home he was a working leading man and a director. Abroad he became a Bond villain and stayed one.

What he was actually good at was authority with something rotten underneath it. He plays men who own the room and fully expect to keep owning it: the smooth De Castro in That Man from Rio, the camp commandant Battaglia in Von Ryan's Express, the team boss Agostini Manetta in Grand Prix, Don Vito Tressoldi running his patch of the city in The Italian Connection. Even his Giovanni de' Medici in The Agony and the Ecstasy is less a patron than a man pricing an artist.

The Italian audience remembers the late run most fondly. As Professor Sassaroli in My Friends and its sequels he joined a group of middle-aged Tuscan men whose entire purpose is elaborate practical jokes, and the casting joke is that the grandest presence in the room turns out to be the one enjoying himself most. He also spent a few very dry minutes in Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty, and by the record he spoofed his own Bond villain in the Neil Connery vehicle released here as Operation Kid Brother.