Leopoldo Trieste

Character actor

Leopoldo Trieste, actor: born Reggio Calabria, Italy 3 May 1917; died Rome 26 January 2003.

Leopoldo Trieste, the Italian character actor, will be best remembered as Father Adelfio, the Sicilian village priest, in Giuseppe Tornatore's tremendously successful film Cinema Paradiso (1988). With his gentle, expressive eyes, Trieste provides one of the film's comic highlights as he sits in the empty cinema, the moral guardian of his flock, communion bell poised to indicate to the long-suffering projectionist exactly where cuts must be made in each new release.

It was a role that typified much of Trieste's screen career, in which he specialised in playing put-upon, flustered little men who often proved surprisingly resilient as well as sympathetic.

Trieste entered films after gaining a director's diploma from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome and serving with a film unit in Sicily during the Second World War. Following a brief appearance in Preludio d'amore (Love Prelude) in 1947, he concentrated on writing plays for stage and radio before being cast by Federico Fellini in the director's solo début, Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952), in which he played Ivan Cavalli, the hapless newly wed husband of a woman obsessed with the "White Sheik" of the title, a comic-book hero played by Alberto Sordi. The following year, Trieste was a would-be writer in Fellini's semi-autobiographical I vitelloni (Spivs), which proved to be their last collaboration, although they remained close friends until Fellini's death in 1994.

Following two less than successful forays into directing, Trieste won acclaim for his performances in Pietro Germi's Divorzio all'italiana (Divorce – Italian Style, 1961) and Sedotto e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned, 1964), before appearing in a number of international productions, including The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) and The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969). In the early 1970s, he was seen in Mario Bava's Reazione a catena (Bloodbath, 1971, later banned in Britain as a so-called "video nasty"), and Nicolas Roeg's Death in Venice (1973).

In 1974, Trieste had a small but memorable role in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part II, playing a Calabrese slum landlord who undergoes a rapid change of heart on learning that Robert De Niro's Vito Corleone is "a man of respect".

His later films included Caligula (1979), The Name of the Rose (1986) and Tornatore's L'Uomo delle stelle (The Starmaker, 1995). He also appeared in a popular coffee advertisement, an undertaking which happily coincided with Trieste's firmly stated, if theologically dubious, belief that "coffee is the best proof of the existence of God".

John Exshaw