Gian Maria Volonte; Actor in Theater, Spaghetti Westerns

Italian actor Gian Maria Volonte, whose roles ranged from Shakespeare to the bad guy in the spaghetti western “A Fistful of Dollars,” has died at age 61.

Volonte, who acted in more than 40 films in a 34-year career, was found dead Tuesday in his hotel room in the northern Greek town of Florina, where he was to appear in “The Gaze of Ulysses” by Greek director Theodoros Angelopoulos.

Italian news reports said Volonte was believed to have suffered a heart attack.

“The world, not just Italy, has lost a great actor,” said director Francesco Rosi, in whose films “The Mattei Affair” (1972), “Lucky Luciano” (1973) and “Christ Stopped at Eboli” (1979) Volonte played leading roles.

“He had extraordinary sensitivity, an enormous talent to bring out the personality of a character through a simple gesture, without saying a word,” Rosi added.

Volonte, born into a middle-class Milan family in 1933, attended Rome’s National School of Dramatic Art and made his theater debut in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” in 1959.

A year later he made his first film appearance with a small part in Duilio Coletti’s “Under Ten Flags.”

But his first major film role was in 1963 in “A Man to Burn” by Valentino Orsini and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. In the film, he showed the first evidence of an intense realism he would bring to many roles, playing a Sicilian union leader who threatens to stage an uprising against the Mafia.

A militant left-winger, Volonte took part in protests during the 1960s and 1970s and served briefly in parliament for the Communist Party.

So it came as no surprise that his greatest award, the 1987 Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, was for a political film, “The Moro Affair,” in which he played Aldo Moro, the Italian Christian Democratic former prime minister kidnaped and killed by left wing guerrillas in 1978.

He also won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983 for his role in “The Death of Mario Ricci.”

Volonte made his name outside Italy in the 1960s as the bad guy in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns “A Fistful of Dollars” and “For a Few Dollars More.”