He was one of the most beloved and most prolific actors of the 70s and 80s. A total of 103 films support the career of the Italian Fabio Testi (1941), who at 83 years old is still full of energy and maintains that physical attractiveness. that crosses the big screen. Testi, who has passed through Sitges to collect the Nosferatu award for his entire career, is overflowing with sympathy and explains in this interview with La Vanguardia the details of his career and his film life.
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He started in the trade by chance. “I was born in a village on Lake Garda, near Verona. It is the largest lake in Europe. So they put two or three palm trees and a galleon there and they filmed pirate movies. They hired us 14 or 15 year old boys as extras. They paid us 3,000 lire, which was a fortune at that time. I told my mother that they had given us 2,000 lire and I put the other thousand in my pocket to go to the disco, to party, because in those days many German tourists came to Lake Garda…”
“It is normal that there is an attraction with the castmates that ends in a relationship on set”
Little by little Testi got to know the people in the sector and they hired him “as a film specialist to shoot the action scenes in the war films.” This is how he arrived in Rome at the legendary Cinecittà studios. “I had started studying architecture and the truth is that I really liked it, but one day a producer came and told me: you are going to be the protagonist of my next film.”
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Testi, who was as smart as he was handsome, negotiated a good contract: “I told him to pay me for acting as an actor on the one hand and as a stuntman on the other, that I would shoot the action scenes and that every fall, from a horse for example, I would charge it separately. One day I killed myself 12 times. “I made quite a bit of money.”
Making films was as fun as it was lucrative and Testi, with some sadness, left architecture to immerse himself in films. But he was aware that it was not enough to be handsome to work in the movies, so he enrolled in the Academy of Dramatic Arts where he stayed for two years until his big opportunity came due to a stroke of luck and those bureaucratic things.
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“Vittorio de Sica was going to bring Giorgio Bassani’s novel The Garden of the Finzi-Contini (1970) to the cinema. The cast was already almost finalized with a French actress, Dominique Sanda, and a German actor, Helmut Berger, as protagonists. The Italian Lino Capolicchio was also going to act in the film, but that was not enough. In order to collect the government subsidy, de Sica needed another Italian interpreter and hired me,” Testi recalls. The film won the Golden Bear in Berlin and the Oscar and Testi entered the firmament of film stars.
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It is obvious that he had a good time and that he has good memories of almost everything he has done. It is difficult for him to recognize what his favorite work is and in the end he opts for Goodbye, Cruel Brother (Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, 1971), which “was an authentic Shakaespirian drama in which a man was in love with his sister and left her pregnant. To avoid scandal, the girl married me, but she didn’t want to make love because she also loved her brother. The thing ended in tragedy because the brother killed the girl, took out her heart and brought it to me: “you didn’t want the heart, here you have it.”
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A real tragedy. But in Testi’s career there has been everything. There have been much happier things like the musical Zorba, the Greek with whom he toured throughout Spain: “The producer wanted me to play the role, but since I didn’t know how to sing or dance, I had to learn. It was very hard, but in the end it turned out wonderful. In Barcelona we spent a month at the Apolo theater and I lived in a hotel on the same property, going to work was very comfortable,” he recalls with amusement.
The Italian has not only filmed a hundred films, he has also experienced countless romances, many of them with his co-stars: “Actresses give themselves in the movies and it is normal that at that moment there is a chemistry, a physical attraction and that, if we both like sex, it ends in a relationship, which lasts a couple of weeks and then you know that at the end of the movie everyone goes their own way,” he says.
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To finish, Testi gives some advice to those who want to start in the profession of acting: “Work, prepare and study hard because we live in a time of rapid television consumption where quality does not prevail and unfortunately there are no longer good actors.” .
