He created artwork for ‘A Fistful of Dollars,’ ‘Conan the
Barbarian’ and more, then made a comeback with ‘Once Upon a Time … in
Hollywood.’
Renato Casaro, the Italian designer of movie posters
renowned for the hand-crafted art he created for films including A Fistful of
Dollars, Conan the Barbarian and the Rambo features, has died. He was 89.
Casaro died Monday night in a hospital in his native
Treviso, Italy, after being admitted days earlier with bronchopneumonia, the
Italian news service RAI reported.Casaro helped put bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger the
map in Hollywood with his poster for the Dino De Laurentiis-produced Conan the
Barbarian (1982), and he also designed posters for the actor’s Red Sonja
(1985), The Running Man (1987), Total Recall (1990), Terminator 2: Judgment Day
(1991) and True Lies (1994).
“Schwarzenegger was the perfect man to paint,” he told The
Guardian in 2022. “He had a tough expression. His face was like a sculpture. It
was a real pleasure for me — I have always had a weakness for heroes.”
Sylvester Stallone, another heroic figure in Hollywood, said
Casaro “captured his soul” with posters for his films, which included the Rambo
features of 1982, 1985 and 1988, plus Over the Top (1987), Lock Up (1989) and
Cliffhanger (1993).
Casaro created posters for lots of spaghetti Westerns early
in his career, and one for Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964), starring
Clint Eastwood, helped that movie become a worldwide sensation. He then
reunited with the Italian filmmaker for My Name Is Nobody (1973) and Once Upon
a Time in America (1984).
Casaro said the key to a successful poster is to “capture
the essential: that moment, that glance, that attitude, that movement that says
everything and condenses the entire story. That’s the hard part,” he told The
New York Times in 2021. “You can’t cheat. You can’t promise something that
isn’t there.”
Born on Oct. 26, 1935, Casaro became fascinated with
billboards as a kid and tried to reproduce paintings by such artists as
American Norman Rockwell and countryman Angelo Cesselon. When he was a
teenager, he drew posters on the walls of the local Garibaldi Cinema in
exchange for tickets.
Casaro landed a job as an apprentice lithographer at the
Zoppelli printing house and worked for a year as an illustrator for the film ad
agency Studio Favalli in Rome before opening his own studio at age 21.
Among his first professional movie posters were for the
rerelease of Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and for the 1955 Italian
films Romeo & Juliet and Zwei blaue Augen. With the rise of the spaghetti
Western, he was drawing about a 100 posters a year.
In 1965, Casaro burst onto the international scene with his
poster for John Huston’s epic The Bible in the Beginning … (1966), which
ignited a long collaboration with De Laurentiis.
“It was a colossal film,” he told CBS News in a 2022
interview. “My posters were put on billboards on Sunset Boulevard. After that,
my phone never stopped ringing.”
One of his favorite pieces was one for Luc Besson’s La Femme
Nikita (1990), and he also worked with Bernardo Bertolucci on The Last Emperor
(1987) and The Sheltering Sky (1990), with David Lynch on Dune (1984) and Wild
at Heart (1990) and with Rob Reiner on The Princess Bride (1987) and Misery
(1990).
His résumé also included artwork for Flash Gordon (1980),
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), Blow Out (1981), Octopussy (1983), The
NeverEnding Story (1984), Angel Heart (1987), The Adventures of Baron
Munchausen (1988), Wild Orchid (1989) and Dances With Wolves (1990).
After a long period in Spain and Germany, he returned to
live and work in his hometown about a decade ago. A documentary about his life,
The Last Movie Painter, was released in 2020.
Casaro stopped designing posters in 1998 when studios turned
away from hand-drawn artwork to use Photoshop and other digital tools. But then
Quentin Tarantino called out of nowhere, looking for posters for a vintage
spaghetti Western starring Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) for Once Upon a Time
… in Hollywood (2019) (below).
Tarantino later sent him a signed photo of DiCaprio with one
of the posters. “Thanks so much for your art gracing my picture,” he said in an
accompanying message. “You’ve always been my favourite.”
We at the Archive share that sentiment, RIP Maestro
With kind thanks to Graham Rye
