Franco Garofalo

Franco Garofalo (18 April 1946 – 22 August 2019), sometimes credited as "Frank Garfield", was an Italian character actor and writer. He is best-known for his role as Zantoro, an eccentric but good-intentioned commando soldier, in the 1980 zombie horror film Hell of the Living Dead, as well as for various roles in independent productions of Italian cinema in the 1970s and 1980s. Early life Franco Garofalo was born in Naples, Italy in 1946. He was the son of an affluent lawyer in the 1950s postwar climate. He attended various schools and would perform amateur acting and poetry for fun. When Garofalo was six years old, his father was stricken with an unknown illness, which progressed until his death when Garofalo was 11 years old. Little is known about Garofalo's early life beyond this incident, although he did get married and had a daughter during the span of his acting career. Career Garofalo's initial acting roles were in minor parts for cast extras and side characters, although by the late 1970s, he started receiving more important roles and varied character parts. This included numerous roles in Italian crime thriller films, such as that of Luca in La Bravata, and roles in Seagulls Fly Low and La banda Vallanzasca, all of which received attention in Roberto Curti's Italian Crime Filmography, establishing his rising prominence in 1970s Italian cinema. Garofalo became internationally-recognized after starring as Zantoro in Bruno Mattei's 1980 zombie horror film Hell of the Living Dead, a film which was later dubbed in English and released in North America and the United Kingdom. Hell of the Living Dead received a cult following, which later led to a featurette documentary called Bonded by Blood released on the Blu-ray disc edition of the film. Claudio Fragasso, who served as co-writer and co-director in Hell of the Living Dead, noted in Bonded by Blood that Franco Garofalo's portrayal of his character's eccentric and increasingly unstable nature was largely improvised by Garofalo himself, including scenes where Zantoro would deliberately provoke and walk into hordes of zombies for fun. Garofalo was popular with the rest of the cast, who found his madcap antics amusing.