Little Known Western Actors ~ Fabian Cevallos

[These daily posts will cover little known actors or people that have appeared in more recent films and TV series. Various degrees of information that I was able to find will be given and anything that you can add would be appreciated.]

Fabian Cevallos was a character actor born in Cuenca, Ecuador in 1946. While he was still young his family moved to Quito the county’s capitol. Fabián, fate later placed him in France to try his luck. As a child, he was amazed watching a film by Gerard Philipe, a mythical French figure, he decided to be an actor like Philipe and pursue without faltering an apparently unrealizable ideal. Paris welcomed the young immigrant when he was just 14 years old in 1959. He entered the Institute of Dramatic Arts, assuming the role that life had in store, demanding sacrifice, and that will to move mountains. For six years he acted in France, before moving to Italy (1968) and appearing in some films, including a 1967 Spaghetti western “Prega dio… e scavatti la fossa!” (Pray to God and Dig Your Grave).

Fate granted him an appointment again through a publication dated 1970, this one, requesting a photographer to personify a reporter in "Sierra Maestra", a film about the Latin American revolution, based on the diaries of the French writer Regis Debray, who was imprisoned after the assassination of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. He had never taken a photograph; but, with a certain audacity and decision he presented himself, being accepted by the director Ansanno Giannarelli, who asked him for a good characterization of the assigned role, when the film began to be shot. Soon they realized that he was not a photographer, without being able to turn back, the photographic director taught him the technique, thus giving birth to his brilliant career. The film crew traveled for two years through Venezuela and other countries until concluding this feature film that made history.

By 1973 he joined Sigma, an international news agency, becoming its correspondent. He covered politics, fashion, magazines, traveling as a special envoy to many countries. His passion for the seventh art made him knock on the doors of film sets, to rub shoulders with the greatest Italian directors: Antonioni, Pasolini, Fellini, Scola, Visconti, Bertolucci or other nationalities such as Wenders, Polanski, Blake Edwards, Francis Ford Coppola, Claude Lelouch and Emir Kusturica, managing to photograph more than 150 films.

In 1990 Fabián Cevallos conceived a photo that became the poster for the international version of the film "The Godfather III" by Francis Ford Coppola, who approved enthusiastically, because it reflected the spirit of the work. He also photographed "Dracula".

Today he lives in Paris.

CEVALLOS, Fabian (aka Fabian Cevalios, Fabien Cevallos) [1946, Cuenca, Ecuador – cameraman, photographer, film, TV actor.

Pray to God and Dig Your Grave – 1967