Terence Hill
From dpa
March 30, 2024, 12:18 a.m
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ARCHIVE – His name is Mario Girotti, he became famous as Terence Hill. Photo: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa
Reading time: 3 minutes
Rome (dpa). This story could also be about Charlie Rivers or Pete Mount. Or something like that. Nobody knows for sure anymore because the list from which the Italian actor Mario Girotti had to choose a stage name for international business in 1967 has been lost.
Anyway, there were about 20 ideas on it. Girotti chose Terence Hill after a night of sleeping. Looking back on the career that followed, that wasn’t the worst decision. On Friday (March 29th), after enormous success with slapstick films, especially in Germany, he will be 85 years old.
ARCHIVE – Terence Hill (l) and Bud Spencer in the successful spaghetti western slapstick “Four Fists for a Hallelujah”.
Photo: Fotoreport/dpa
The Venetian-born son of an Italian explains why he chose Terence Hill with his family history: He apparently chose the name because his German mother, who had already died at the time, was called Hildegard Thieme – i.e. with the initials HT, and vice versa TH. Girotti/Hill spent most of the first years of his life in Lommatzsch, a town near Dresden. Some German remains with him to this day. He has even had a German passport for two years.
New name, new luck
With the new pseudonym for the spaghetti western “God never forgives… Django!” Pretty much everything was different back then. In the same year he also married (the German-American Lori Zwicklbauer, the name is real), and his career really took off. And for the first time, the wiry man with steel blue eyes had a somewhat corpulent colleague with a beard at his side, also from Italy, who was actually called Carlo Pedersoli, but now: Bud Spencer. That was the start of a lifelong collaboration and friendship too.
Girotti already had a considerable workload behind him at the time. He had his first experiences in front of the camera when he was twelve. In the 50s and 60s, the boom years of Italian cinema, he made films on an assembly line. Mostly mass-produced goods, but he also starred in Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece “The Leopard”. In Germany he was known for supporting roles in various Karl May film adaptations: As Lieutenant Robert Merril in “Winnetou II” he was allowed to shake the Apache’s hand and marry the chief’s daughter Ribanna.
Two hands, four fists
With Bud Spencer, the romances were over. Women only played supporting roles. The very first scene the duo shot was a fight. And then things continued happily. The films were called “The Right Hand and the Left Hand of the Devil”, “Two Dogs of Heaven on the Way to Hell” or “Four Fists for an Alleluia”, but the story was actually always simple and the same: pretty boy and colossus get together and beat each other up Rogues and knock sayings like “Get out of the sun,” “I’ll put a dent in your pickle,” or “The best horse can’t fart without hay.”
From today’s perspective it’s not so funny anymore, but back then Spencer & Hill were guaranteed huge commercial success. The “Four Fists” attracted twelve million visitors to German cinemas. By the way, in the GDR the film was shown under the title: “The little one and the tired Joe”. The two were partners and friends for half a century until Spencer died in 2016 at the age of 86. “When Bud and I were filming together, we just clicked and we were funny,” Hill recalled. He found out about the other’s death while filming in the Spanish desert – where it all began.
Success solo too
In contrast to Spencer, Hill also had solo success. Many consider the spaghetti western “My Name is Nobody” to be his best film, with Hollywood legend Henry Fonda at his side, who picked up a gun for the last time. The film was directed by cinema grandmaster Sergio Leone and the music was by Ennio Morricone. Hill later tried his hand at directing several times, for example with a new edition of the priest-versus-mayor classic “Don Camillo and Peppone”. He also played the Catholic priest. The reviews were mediocre.
However, his work as a cinema priest gave rise to a very successful television series in Italy, in which he solved criminal cases as Father “Don Matteo”. He only ended it three years ago after 250 episodes. The TV series “The Mountain Police – Very Close to Heaven”, in which he hunted criminals in the Dolomites as mountain forester Pietro, is now history.
After many years in his adopted home of the USA, Hill now lives most of his time in Umbria, where his father’s family comes from. In the town of Amelia he runs an ice cream parlor, Gelateria Girotti. There is now a branch in Saxony, the mother’s homeland. Of course, the ice cream parlor in Dresden has a different name: Terence Hill Eis Saloon.
© dpa-infocom, dpa:240327-99-484673/3
2024-03-29 18:07:00
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