Tomas Milian

Havana, then the Actors Studio in New York, then Rome. Milian, who lived from 1933 to 2017, took an unusual route into Italian cinema, and the Method training never quite left him: even in the cheapest pictures he plays intensity as though someone might be grading him on it.

He arrived in Italy in the late 1950s and worked his way through every genre the industry produced. There are the prestige beginnings, a segment of Boccaccio '70, an uncredited turn in Ro.Go.Pa.G., Raphael in The Agony and the Ecstasy. Then the westerns, where he became a star: dirty, funny, verbally relentless bandits and peasants who talk while everybody else glowers. Compañeros, Face to Face and Run, Man, Run are the ones that show why Italian audiences took to him. He also turned up in a giallo, Don't Torture a Duckling, and in the crime pictures that followed the westerns, one of which, Syndicate Sadists, gave him a character named Rambo years before that name belonged to somebody else.

His third act was Hollywood character work, and the irony is sharp: after decades of leads in Italy, he became the reliable supporting man, usually cast as a Latin American figure of authority. General Salazar in Traffic is the best of them, Leopoldo in JFK the most repeated on television, and The Lost City let him play a Cuban of his own generation at last.