I Will Wait For You, Nino Castelnuovo

I don't feel as if I can write a proper memorial to Italian actor Nino Castelnuovo because I've only seen a very small handful of his movies. But his most famed role -- that of "Guy" in Jacques Demy's 1964 masterpiece The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, one of my all-time favorites -- is so crucial to my love of the movies that I can hardly not give him a loving mention here on the site. Especially since he's got his own wee little Archives, which I heartily recommend clicking through. Other films I've seen him include Luchino Visconti's very brilliant Rocco and His Brothers, which put him opposite Alain Delon...

... for which every gay for all of time owes Luchino a debt of gratitude. And then the 1975 giallo with the fabulously perfect giallo title of Strip Nude For Your Killer, a film I covered pretty thoroughly right here, at least gratuity-wise. 

Not too long ago Arrow put out a great blu-ray of that film, by the way, and if you have any affection for giallo it's one you should check out. It's not particularly scary but it's got that vibe in spades, you know the one, that giallo one. And then later in life I guess he had a small role in The English Patient...

... which I never knew or noticed until it got mentioned in his obits, not even when I watched that movie just a couple of weeks ago. Shame on me, but the role's really not substantial and we are talking twenty years since the last time I'd seen him. And I think that's all of his that I have seen? But Umbrellas is an annual watch for me, sometimes even more often than that, and his Guy remains the swooniest lead in any movie musical according to me, hands down. 

I re-watched the film for the ten millionth time last night in his honor (you can see the Twitter thread here to go along with that) and that first chapter of the film, as he and Catherine Deneuve fall in love and then are forced to separate, makes me cry every time just from the perfect exquisite beauty of it -- seriously my boyfriend looked over and laughed at me because at only the twenty-minute-mark I already had tears rolling down my face. It's probably the most romantic sequence ever put on-screen. Anyway if you've got more recommendations from his filmography please share in the comments, and I'll give you a few more worthwhile photos of him after the jump...