Brazzi, Rossano

▪ 1995

      Italian actor (b. Sept. 18, 1916, Bologna, Italy—d. Dec. 24, 1994, Rome, Italy), personified the handsome heartbreaker and romantic aristocrat in over 200 films, most of them made in the U.S. In 1939 he gave up a promising law career to debut in The Trial and Death of Socrates. Though he was a reigning screen idol by the 1940s, Brazzi secretly worked with Resistance fighters in Rome during World War II. After the war, his popularity declined in Italy, but he became immensely popular in the U.S., notably as Émile de Becque in South Pacific (1958). The blue-eyed sex symbol's first Hollywood film appearance was as the professor in Little Women (1949), a performance that so enraptured his fans that they later mobbed Brazzi at his Los Angeles motel, seeking autographs and other souvenirs. Brazzi found widespread fame portraying swashbuckling playboys in such films as The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Summertime (1955), Count Your Blessings (1959), The Great Waltz (1972), and White Telephone (1976). By the late 1960s, he returned to Italy to work in television and film, but the success he enjoyed in Hollywood eluded him. In 1984 Brazzi was indicted along with 36 others for international drug and weapons smuggling; the charges against him, however, were later dropped. Brazzi was working on a film when he was hospitalized with a viral infection that disabled his nervous system and eventually claimed his life.

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