Duccio Tessari (11 October 1926 – 6 September 1994) was an Italian film director, screenwriter and actor, considered one of the fathers of

Spaghetti Western The spaghetti Western is a broad subgenre of Western films produced in Europe. It emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone's filmmaking style and international box-office success. The term was used by foreign critics because most o ...

s. Born in

Genoa Genoa ( ; ; ) is a city in and the capital of the Italian region of Liguria, and the sixth-largest city in Italy. As of 2025, 563,947 people live within the city's administrative limits. While its metropolitan city has 818,651 inhabitan ...

, Tessari started in the fifties as documentarist and as screenwriter of

peplum films Sword-and-sandal, also known as peplum (: pepla), is a subgenre of largely Italy, Italian-made historical, mythological, or biblical epics mostly set in the Greco-Roman antiquity or the Middle Ages. These films attempted to emulate the big-budget ...

. In 1964 he co-wrote

Sergio Leone Sergio Leone ( ; ; 3 January 1929 – 30 April 1989) was an Italian filmmaker, credited as the pioneer of the spaghetti Western genre. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema. Leone's film-making style ...

's ''

A Fistful of Dollars ''A Fistful of Dollars'' (, (''For a Fistful of Dollars'')) is a 1964 spaghetti Western film directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood in his first leading role, alongside Gian Maria Volonté, Marianne Koch, Wolfgang Lukschy, Si ...

'', one year later he gained an impressive commercial success and launched the

Giuliano Gemma Giuliano Gemma (; 2 September 1938 – 1 October 2013) was an Italian actor. He is best known internationally for his work in Spaghetti Westerns, particularly for his performances as the title character in Duccio Tessari's '' A Pistol for Ringo'' ...

's career with ''

A Pistol for Ringo ''A Pistol for Ringo'' () is a 1965 Spaghetti Western, a joint Italian and Spanish production. Originally written and directed by Duccio Tessari, the film's success led to a follow-up, '' The Return of Ringo'', later that year, which, in spite of ...

'' and its immediate sequel, ''

The Return of Ringo ''The Return of Ringo'' () is a 1965 Italian spaghetti Western film directed by Duccio Tessari from a screenplay he had co-written with Fernando Di Leo, inspired by Homer's ''Odyssey''. It stars Giuliano Gemma (billed as 'Montgomery Wood') in t ...

''. In 1975, Tessari launched the most popular and successful European depiction of Zorro, when he directed ''

Zorro Zorro ( or , Spanish for "fox") is a fictional character created in 1919 by American Pulp magazine, pulp writer Johnston McCulley, appearing in works set in the Pueblo de Los Ángeles in Alta California. He is typically portrayed as a dashin ...

'' starring

Alain Delon Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon (; 8 November 1935 – 18 August 2024) was a French actor, film producer, screenwriter, singer, and businessman. Acknowledged as a cultural and cinematic leading man of the 20th century, Delon emerged as one of ...

as the titular masked hero. The movie was a smash hit in Europe, Russia, Japan and China. He later touched different genres and worked in

RAI (), commercially styled as since 2000 and known until 1954 as (RAI), is the national public broadcasting company of Italy, owned by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. RAI operates many terrestrial and subscription television channels a ...

, directing some successful TV-series. He died of cancer in Rome, at 67. He was married to actress

Lorella De Luca Lorella De Luca (17 September 1940 – 9 January 2014) was an Italian film, television, and voice actress. One of the most recognized '' ingénues'' of Italian cinema during the mid-to-late 1950s, she is best known for having played naive young ...

Filmography

:Note: The films listed as N/A are not necessarily chronological.

References

Bibliography

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External links

* 1926 births Film people from Genoa 1994 deaths Italian film directors 20th-century Italian screenwriters Italian male screenwriters Spaghetti Western directors Deaths from cancer in Lazio Giallo film directors 20th-century Italian male writers Long stubs with short prose {{Italy-film-director-stub