Carlo Giuffrè

Carlo Giuffrè, a name which has become inseparable from three others, Aldo Giuffrè, Naples and Eduardo De Filippo. Younger brother of Aldo Giuffrè, he has had, like him, a very long and fruitful career, in the theater, in the movies and on TV, both as good-looking manly protagonists or -and mainly as far as Carlo is concerned - hilarious comedians in the Commedia dell'Arte style. One of their rare meetings on the big screen, in Tre sotto il lenzuolo (1979), with Aldo as a cardinal and Carlo as a businessman who believes the woman in his hotel room is a present to him from the cardinal, is downright irrepressible. A native from Naples, Carlo Giuffrè never disowned his hometown, quite the contrary. He indeed played in most of Eduardo De Filippo's plays (some he also directed), and everybody knows that the great Neapolitan playwright always sets his works in the city that you must see before dying. On the screen, whether big or small, Naples is the setting of many of his films, in which he attracted girls, clowned or ruled as a Camorra godfather, from his very first filmed appearance in De Filippo's Side Street Story (1950) to Steno's TV mini-series L'ombra nera del Vesuvio (1986). As for Eduardo De Filippo, he was instrumental in Carlo's successful career, since the actor has been the performer of his favorite author for decades. Carlo Giuffrè met the maestro in 1948, while in second year of Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica and both men never parted ways until the playwright's death in 1984. One of the most characteristic faces of Italian-style comedy Carlo Giuffrè received a David de Donatello in 1984 and in 2007 he was made 'Grande Ufficiale' by the Italian President.