Farewell to Nino Castelnuovo, the famous Renzo of “I Promessi Sposi”

The general public remembers him above all for having lent his face to Renzo Tramaglino in the drama of the Betrothed made for Rai by Sandro Bolchi in 1967 but, to be honest, Nino Castelnuovo, that leaves us today, September 7, at the age of 84 after a long illness, he had many roles and experiences. Born in Lecco in 1936, Castelnuovo, a pupil of the Piccolo Teatro school and a TV frequenter together with Cino Tortorella, boasts a career that has seen him collaborate, among others, with Pietro Germi, which launched it in the Damn scam, Luchino Visconti, Carlo Lizzani, Luigi Comencini, Nanni Loy and Alfredo Giannetti.

The musical by Jacques Demy Umbrellas of Cherbourg with Catherine Deneuve, Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1964, earned him international success which continued several years later with another popular film such as The English patient by Anthony Minghella, who saw him in the role of the Italian archaeologist D’Agostino. Together with the extraordinary success of the Betrothed with Paola Pitagora and other very popular dramas such as Portrait of a veiled woman, Nino Castelnuovo has become familiar to Italians also in the advertising ofHeart Oil (the frame in which the fence jumps is memorable) and in fiction as Magic spell on Raidue e Eva’s three roses on Canale 5, his latest role.

In his private life, he remembers the mourning of his brothers Pierantonio and Clemente, who died respectively in 1976 due to a beating and a car accident, and the glaucoma that hit him in his later years – “It is a cowardly disease, it slowly creeps in and upsets your existence” – but which has not, however, extinguished his calm and elegant enthusiasm, preserved until his death, faced with extreme discretion even by the relatives, who have chosen for him the private funeral.