Acting career
Vallone made his film debut in 1942 as an extra in We the Living, but he was not initially interested in an acting career. Nevertheless, he was cast as a soldier competing with Vittorio Gassman for the love of Silvana Mangano in Riso amaro (Bitter Rice; 1949). The film became a neorealist classic and Vallone was launched on an international career.
He played rugged, romantic leading men in the 1950s, including in Anna (1951) and The Beach (1954), both directed by Alberto Lattuada; Pietro Germi's The Crossroads (1951), and Giuseppe De Santis' Rome 11:00 (1952). He played Giuseppe Garibaldi, opposite Anna Magnani as Anita Garibaldi, in Francesco Rosi's directorial debut Red Shirts (1952). He was the male lead in Vittorio De Sica's Two Women, which earned its star Sophia Loren the Academy Award for Best Actress. His screen persona and acting style were often likened to those of Burt Lancaster. Curzio Malaparte, who directed him in The Forbidden Christ (1951), called Vallone "the only Marxist face in Italian cinema."
Vallone's work extended to other parts of Europe. He played opposite Maria Schell in two West German films, Love (1956) and Rose Bernd (1957), and was cast by French director Marcel Carné opposite Simone Signoret in Thérèse Raquin (1953). He played opposite Sara Montiel in The Violet Seller (1958), a musical that was the most internationally successful Spanish-language film released up to that point.
He made his American film debut opposite Charlton Heston in the historical epic El Cid (1961), as Count Ordóñez. He subsequently starred in Jules Dassin's Phaedra (1962), Otto Preminger's The Cardinal (1963) and Rosebud (1975), Gordon Douglas' Harlow (1965), Henry Hathaway's Nevada Smith (1966), Peter Collinson's The Italian Job (1969), John Huston's The Kremlin Letter (1970), Lamont Johnson's A Gunfight (1971), Charles Jarrott's The Other Side of Midnight (1977), J. Lee Thompson's The Greek Tycoon (1978), Michael Ritchie's An Almost Perfect Affair (1979) and Moustapha Akkad's Lion of the Desert (1980). He had a late-career boost when Francis Ford Coppola cast him as Cardinal Lamberto, the future Pope John Paul I, in The Godfather Part III (1990).
On stage, Vallone was known for his association with playwright Arthur Miller, notably as Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge. He first played the role in Peter Brook's acclaimed 1958 staging in Paris at the Théâtre Antoine-Simone Berriau. He reprised it for Sidney Lumet's 1962 film adaptation, which earned him the David di Donatello for Best Actor; a 1966 ITV Play of the Week, a 1967 Italian staging that he also directed, and a 1973 version for Italian television. In 1980, he directed a production for the Théâtre de Paris.
In 1994, he was made a Knight's Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for his contributions to the arts.
