Aldo Maccione is 84 years old. A resident of France for
several years, he was part of the Brutos comic-music quintet. After years
of work in the music hall, he established himself as a valuable comedian in
many Italian and French films.
Aldo Maccione is 84 years old. He has been living
in France for
several years and is part of the I Brutos comedy-music
quintet . After years of work in the music hall, he
established himself as a valuable comedian in many Italian and French
films. After winning a radio competition at the end of the fifties, he
joined the cabaret-music group from Turin
de I Brutos, with which he achieved great international success,
performing among other things triumphantly at the Olympia in Paris. In the
mid-sixties he left the group and founded a similar one, known as Los
Tontos, with which he performed for six years in a row at the Emporium of Barcelona. Sacha
Distel accompanies the tour of London and
Paris (still at the Olympia), who coined the nickname
"Aldo la Classe" for him. In 1970, Claude Lelouch, who
had known Maccione since the Brutos era, having directed
him in some scopitons, had him debut as a soloist with the film La
rogue, and recalled him in 1972 in L'avventura è
l'Aventura where he was one of the four protagonists alongside Lino
Ventura, Charles Denner and Jacques Brel. The
following year he returned (after the unfortunate Brutos films)
to Italian cinema with two films related to the character of Colonel
Buttiglione. Between the seventies and the early eighties, Maccione
divided his time equally between Italian and French cinema, preferring in both
cases brilliant roles. In Italy his greatest popularity comes thanks to
some films played in tandem with Renato Pozzetto (Due cuori, una cappella, Sono
photogenic, Fico d'India, Porca vacca)
and to some scoffed comedies, in France thanks to the films starring
alongside Pierre Richard (Sono timido…
ma lei mi cura, C’est pas moi, c’est lui).
In the eighties, Maccione's activity is increasingly
concentrated in France: these are the years of his final consecration in the
French box office as the protagonist in modest comedies (often directed by
Philippe Clair and mostly unreleased in Italy) where he perfects his character
of “Aldo la Classe” (already celebrated in 1972 also in a homonymous
song by Maccione himself), a typical caricature of the Italian seducer and a
bit of a Gascon, with an unmistakable speech and a characteristic way of walking
(the “marche du séducteur"). The success is such that some old
Italian films are also distributed where the Turin actor has only supporting roles and
that are passed off as Maccione's new films. At the end of the eighties,
following a couple of failures, he abandoned this character to try to move into
different roles. Between 1991 and 1995 he plays in four films for the TV
series Aldo tous risques. In 1994 he returned after
twelve years to star in an Italian film, playing a layman in Perdiamoci
di vista by Carlo Verdone. In 1997 he worked
with Bigas Luna for The Image of Desire and
in 2002 he was a godfather for Aldo, Giovanni and Giacomo (The
legend of Al, John and Jack). He returned to acting in a wholly French
production after more than three decades in 2005, in the film Home Works
- Travaux.
In 2010 he took part in the reality show La
Ferme Célébrités (lett. "The Farm of the
Famous"), from which he retired due to health problems. In
November 2010 he received the 2010 Career Award at
the MonteCarlo Film Festival. The actor appears,
portrayed in his typical walk, as a guest-star in
the 29th album of the series Asterix, La rosa
e il gladio (La Rose et le Glaive, 1991), in the role of a
Roman legionnaire who would like to serve in a legion of women. His walk
is imitated by the character of Toni, a fan of "Aldo la Classe", in a
beach scene of the movie Mektoub, My Love: singing one of Abdellatif
Kechiche in 2017. He currently resides in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
