Comedy actor Bud Spencer dies

ROME — Italian actor Bud Spencer, who starred in a string of spaghetti westerns and comedies with Terence Hill, died on Monday (June 27) in Rome aged 86, his family confirmed.

“With our deepest regrets, we have to tell you that Bud is flying to his next journey,” his family said on Spencer’s Twitter account in English.

“My father died peacefully at 18:15 and did not suffer from pain, he had all of us next to him and his last words were ‘Thank you’,” his son and film producer Giuseppe Pedersoli said in a note to media.

The news of his death prompted a flood of online reactions.

“Ciao #BudSpencer We loved you so much,” Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi tweeted.

Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini hailed Spencer as “a great actor of our cinema industry, who over the course of his long career entertained whole generations”.

“RIP Bud Spencer ... My heart goes out to your family,” Hollywood star Russell Crowe wrote on Twitter.

Speaking to channel SKY TG24, Osvaldo De Santis, president of 20th Century Fox in Italy, said: “He was an actor whom Italian cinema needs to thank because he brought Italian movies around the world.”

Spencer, born Carlo Pedersoli in Italy in 1929, was born in the southern Italian city of Naples, but moved with his family to Rome aged 11, where he became an excellent swimmer.

After World War II, the family moved again, this time to Rio de Janeiro, where the young Pedersoli quit his studies and started taking odd jobs, including in construction and as a librarian.

He later returned to Rome, where he went back to school and took up competitive swimming, and in 1950, Pedersoli became the first Italian to swim the 100m freestyle in under a minute. Over the next decade, he was crowned Italy’s swimming champion seven times. But after the 1960 Olympics in Rome, he abandoned his swimming career.

He married the daughter of a film producer and had three children.

It was only at the age of 38, in 1967, that Pedersoli starred in his first western, God Forgives... I Don’t! — the first of 16 films alongside Hill, whose real name was Mario Girotti. Pedersoli and Girotti then decided to change their names — and the name Pedersoli chose, Bud Spencer, was a tribute to his favourite beer and American actor Spencer Tracy.

He played in action and comedy films in the 1970s and 1980s, often cast as a cowboy or policeman. With the They Call Me Trinity (1970), he and Hill sprung to international fame (the film was dubbed in English), with Spencer playing a friendly giant of a cowboy who saves a widow and an orphan from danger while keeping his broad grin.

He appeared in around 40 films, including the Flatfoot series of films; the Trinity sequel Trinity Is Still My Name (1971); the gangster comedy Double Trouble (1984) and A Friend Is A Treasure (1981).

He also dabbled in politics, running for office in regional elections in 2005 on the list of then-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. AGENCIES