Remo Girone, the stage actor Italy never separated from Tano Cariddi

Remo Girone

Photo: Pier Gangitano / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 1, 1948 Asmara, Eritrea
Died	October 3, 2025 (76)
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Ford v Ferrari, The Equalizer 3, Live by Night
Awards	Commander of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity · Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic · Order of Saint-Charles · Premio Flaiano career award

For a generation of Italian television viewers, Remo Girone never quite got his own name back. He was Tano Cariddi, the illegitimate son of a Sicilian boss who studied his way out of a farmhouse, went into service with a banking dynasty and ended up running its bank with the Mafia’s money behind him. Strangers stopped him in the street for decades. He liked to tell of a homeless man at a church in Nice that fed the poor, who looked at him and announced that he knew him: he was the one from La piovra. Girone told it against himself, partly because the work he valued most happened where that audience rarely followed him, on stage, in Chekhov, in rehearsal rooms run by directors with no interest in villains.

The son of Italian emigrants, Girone grew up in Asmara, the Eritrean capital where he was born, and he was reciting poems and dramatic pieces in front of local audiences while still a child. A critic in the Giornale dell’Eritrea, reviewing one of those performances, told readers to remember the boy’s name. At thirteen he moved to Rome for secondary school. A brief stint studying economics and commerce at university gave way to the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica Silvio d’Amico, where he trained as an actor.

The theatre gave him a standing with critics that he kept long after television made him famous. He worked with Luca Ronconi on Alfieri’s Mirra, with Orazio Costa on Death of a Salesman and with Yuri Lyubimov on Crime and Punishment, and Franco Battiato directed him in Gli Schopenhauer. Chekhov was the author he kept coming back to. His screen career effectively started with one of his plays: after a debut in Miklós Jancsó’s Roma rivuole Cesare, Marco Bellocchio gave him his first lead in Il gabbiano, drawn from The Seagull. Two decades later he was in Peter Stein’s Uncle Vanya, a production he took to the Edinburgh festival in 1996.

Television changed the scale of everything. In 1987 he joined Rai’s mafia saga La piovra for its third season, and Tano Cariddi, a crooked banker said to have been modelled in part on Michele Sindona, became the figure the series kept circling back to. Girone played him through the seasons broadcast in 1989, 1990, 1992 and 1995. The scripts handed Tano the insult that defined him, thrown by a bank director shortly before Tano kills him: you have the soul of a servant, you will never be the master. Years later Girone offered his own reading of the character’s appeal. Tano had a humanity of his own, he said, and the public lay in wait for his moments of weakness, after which he would pull himself together and turn wicked again. Then he added that perhaps the character was so loved because he played him well.

That success came at a price the series’ official legend tends to skip. During the years he played Tano, Girone was diagnosed with bladder cancer. After surgery, with chemotherapy still ahead, the producers wanted to end his contract and replace him with a similar character. The way out came from his wife, the actress Victoria Zinny, who proposed closing his storyline early with a strong scene and bringing him back once treatment was over. That is roughly what happened: Tano all but disappeared and returned for the tenth and final season, broadcast in 2001. The episode says something uncomfortable about Italian television at the height of its power, which treated its most popular villain as a replaceable part. It also fixed Girone in place. For the rest of his career producers at home and abroad cast him again and again as bosses, patriarchs and men with money, and the Chekhov actor spent much of his screen life playing variations on Tano.

Fame pulled him into rooms where he admitted he did not belong. In 1991 he co-hosted the variety show Settimo squillo on Telemontecarlo with Zinny and her son Karl. A year after telling the Sanremo audience in 1992 that he could never be a singer, he recorded Io credo with Marcella Bella, and the festival’s selection committee turned the song down.

Between television seasons he worked with filmmakers who had little to do with crime drama. Véra Belmont cast him as the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully in Marquise; he played the father in Tom Tykwer’s Heaven, appeared for Ettore Scola in Il viaggio di Capitan Fracassa, for Jacques Rivette in Don’t Touch the Axe and twice for Krzysztof Zanussi. Italian children heard him without seeing him, since he spoke and sang the chief Powhatan in the Italian version of Pocahontas.

The late career belonged to older men with power. In Il gioiellino, Andrea Molaioli’s film drawn from the Parmalat collapse, he played the company founder Amanzio Rastelli opposite Toni Servillo. Ben Affleck cast him as the mob boss Maso Pescatore in Live by Night, and James Mangold made him Enzo Ferrari in Ford v Ferrari, the patriarch whose refusal of Ford’s offer sets the Le Mans rivalry in motion. Todd McCarthy, reviewing for The Hollywood Reporter, wrote that his Ferrari presided over his empire like a cross between a medieval lord and a mafia boss, which could stand as a summary of what the industry had been asking of Girone since the late 1980s. In Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer 3, shot on the Amalfi coast, he played Enzo Arisio opposite Denzel Washington. His final film was Il circo delle meraviglie, directed by Mario Chiavalin, alongside Pippo Franco and Iva Zanicchi.

Official recognition came late. He was made a Commendatore of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity in 2009 and an Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 2018, and Monaco admitted him to the Order of Saint-Charles in 2019. In 2021 the Premi Flaiano gave him a career award for theatre, and he collected another career prize on the Lido during that year’s Venice festival. He had married Zinny, best known abroad for Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana, in 1982, and the couple spent his last years in Monte Carlo.

Born in Asmara on 1 December 1948, Girone died at his home in Monte Carlo on 3 October 2025, at 76; Italian press reported a sudden respiratory failure. His funeral took place in Monaco’s cathedral, and Rome’s Casa del Cinema held a tribute on 11 October. What the body of work argues is easy to miss behind the character who swallowed it. Tano frightened people because Girone played calculation as a private struggle, with a stage actor’s patience for a man losing an argument with himself. The bank director who told Tano he would never be the master was wrong about the character, and the actor who kept going back to Chekhov between seasons was the proof that the part never owned him either.

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Tags: actors, Italian cinema, James Mangold, Remo Girone, Ford v Ferrari, La piovra

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