Monday, March 30, 2015

Rik Battaglia

Actor -- via La Repubblica. AKA Caterino Bertaglia, Rick Austin, Riccardo Battaglia, Rick Battaglia. After being discovered in a bar by Ponti, he played across from Sophia Loren in "The River Girl" in 1955. Then he moved on to peplum (sword-and-sandal) films, followed by a few Hollywood Biblical epics ("Esther and the King," "Sodom and Gomorrah"). He settled into Karl May films (May was the German equivalent of an adventure writer such as Robert Louis Stevenson or Zane Grey), and played many a villain in spaghetti Westerns.