I found out today that Carlo Pedersoli, also known as Bud Spencer, passed away on the 27th of June in Rome.
To fans of Italian westerns, he was best known as ‘Bambino’ the huge, surly sidekick to Terence Hill’s character Trinity - they were often paired together as sort of a comic action version of Laurel and Hardy. The fight scenes that usually ensued in their movies were amusingly choreographed to show off Hill’s quickness and Spencer’s strength.
Pedersoli himself was a fascinating man, a sort of template for the ‘World’s Most Interesting Man’ - an Olympic swimmer who held world records, a lawyer, an inventor, a pilot, a singer and musician, and so on. His IMDB page is vast, but it’s not easy to find many of his movies on Netflix or Amazon - I found more complete movies looking on YouTube of all places.
It seems like half of the remembrances of him on YouTube on his passing are simply compilations of his best moments wrecking people during comical fight scenes.
RIP big guy. The world is less interesting without you.
Tim