Trivia: Lead actor Castel appeared on screen from the '60s.

Trivia: Though he invariably looked sickly and tubercular, Polish/German actor Klaus Kinski rose to fame in roles calling for near-manic aggressiveness. His war career consisted primarily of a year and a half in a British POW camp. After this experience, Kinski took to the theater, where he rapidly built a reputation for on-stage brilliance and off-stage emotional instability. He made his first German film, Morituri, in 1948; three years later, he made his English-language movie debut with a fleeting bit in Decision Before Dawn (1951). Villainy was Kinski's film stock in trade during the 1950s and '60s, with several appearances in Germany's Edgar Wallace second-feature series and in such Italian spaghetti Westerns as For a Few Dollars More (1965). International stardom came Kinski's way via his off-the-beam appearances in the films of director Werner Herzog, notably Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1973), Woyzeck (1978), Nosferatu (1979), and Fitzcarraldo (1982). With 1989's Paganini, Kinski proved to be as colorful and chaotic a director as he was an actor. Kinski was the father of actress Nastassja Kinski, though the two seldom saw each other and were never close. He died in 1991.

Trivia: One of Great Britain's foremost pin-up girls, the delightful Martine Beswicke has managed the neat trick of being kinky and classy all in one. Billed as "Martin Beswick," Beswicke made her first film appearance as one of the fighting gypsy girls in the 1963 James Bond flick From Russia With Love; she returned to Bondland with a more substantial role in Thunderball (1965). After drawing attention away from a near-naked Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. (1966), Beswicke was awarded with the leading role in the similar Prehistoric Women (1967). She attracted the notice of the intelligentsia with her performance as a leather-clad lesbian in 1967's Penthouse, then went on to play half the title role in Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971). By contrast, her portrayal of Xaviera Hollander in The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood was a model of restraint. American TV viewers were given ample opportunity to drink in the charms of Martine Beswicke in the 1979 miniseries The Innocent and the Damned -- not to mention her brief but impressive (and fully clothed) appearance in a well-circulated beer commercial of the early '80s.

Trivia: Milan-born actor/political activist Gian Maria Volonté was trained at the Academia Nazionale de Arti Drammatica. Volonté's first film appearance was in the internationally produced Under Ten Flags (1960). He gained worldwide prominence with his apolitical performances in such spaghetti westerns as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965), then increasingly wore his left-leaning heart on his sleeve in the films of such like-minded directors as Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi. He played the police inspector in Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), and was seen in the Rosi-directed Lucky Luciano (1973) in the title role, and in Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979) as famed antifascist author Carlo Levi. Shortly before his death at the age of 61, Volonté appeared in Banderas the Tyrant (1994).

Trivia: Spanish supporting and occasional leading actor Aldo Sambrell is primarily associated with spaghetti Westerns of the '60s. In those films, he generally played a gunslinger. He was born Alfredo Sanchez Brell but over the course of his career he used the following names: Aldo Brell, Alfred S. Brell, Aldo San Brell, Aldo Sanbrel, and Aldo Sanbrell. He made his directorial debut as Alfred S. Brell with La Ultima Jugada (1974). Sambrell produced his first film, Hammam, in 1997.

Trivia: Carla Gravina played leading roles in international productions from the '50s through the '90s and served as a former deputy in the Italian parliament. She made her feature-film debut in 1956 playing opposite comedian Toto and Vittorio Gassman in I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street/Big Deal). Gravina appeared in three more films between then and 1960, including Tutti a Casa! (Everybody Go Home) before disappearing from the screen. It would be eight years before she appeared in her next film, La Monaca di Monza: Una Storia Lombarda. In 1979, Gravina won a Best Supporting Actress award at that year's Cannes Film Festival for La Terrazza (The Terrace). After that, she worked with the government through 1983. A decade later, Gravina was named Best Actress at the 1993 Montreal Film Festival for her work in Margarethe Von Trotta's Lungo Silenco.

Trivia: A lifelong Rome resident and classically trained musician, Ennio Morricone began studying at the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia at age 12. Advised to study composition, Morricone also specialized in playing trumpet and supported himself by playing in a jazz band and working as an arranger for Italian radio and TV after he graduated. Morricone subsequently became a top studio arranger at RCA, working with such stars as Mario Lanza, Chet Baker, and the Beatles. Well-versed in a variety of musical idioms from his RCA experience, Morricone began composing film scores in the early '60s. Though his first films were undistinguished, Morricone's arrangement of an American folk song intrigued director (and former schoolmate) Sergio Leone. Leone hired Morricone and together they created a distinctive score to accompany Leone's different version of the Western, A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Rather than orchestral arrangements of Western standards à la John Ford, Morricone used gunshots, cracking whips, voices, Sicilian folk instruments, trumpets, and the new Fender electric guitar to punctuate and comically tweak the action, cluing in the audience to the taciturn man's ironic stance. Morricone's name became almost as well-known as Leone's when his more ambitious score for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) yielded a Top Ten hit.Even more so than in the first two Dollars films, Morricone's scores for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Leone's epic Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) elevated the action to operatic heights. Reaching crescendos in The Good's famous graveyard shootout and West's showdown between Charles Bronson's Harmonica and Henry Fonda's Frank Booth, Morricone and Leone created set pieces that were as powerful musically as visually, placing music on a par with the image rather than subordinating it. Morricone's scores were so integral to Leone's Westerns that he had Morricone write and record Once Upon a Time in the West's main themes, and then played them during shooting so that the actors could move to the score's rhythms. Morricone and Leone repeated this for their equally effective collaboration on the gangster saga Once Upon a Time in America (1984). Even as he was permanently changing the landscape of Western scores, the breadth of Morricone's talent became apparent as he took on more overtly "art" film projects. Morricone's music lent drama to Gillo Pontecorvo's highly regarded, documentary-style war film The Battle of Algiers (1966); that of Algiers and his score for Pontecorvo's Queimada! (1969) were two of Morricone's outstanding, non-Leone 1960s works. Morricone also delved into the remnants of Italian cinema's postwar heritage with Marco Bellochio's unsung, late neorealist film Fist in His Pocket (1965), Bernardo Bertolucci's neo-neorealist second film Before the Revolution (1964), and Pier Paolo Pasolini's parable/farewell to that legacy, Hawks and Sparrows (1966). Keeping pace with Bertolucci's and Pasolini's evolving styles and concerns, Morricone continued to collaborate with the directors into the 1970s. From the Godard-ian Partner (1968) to the coming of age story Luna (1979) and hostage drama Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1980), Morricone enhanced the emotion and drama of Bertolucci's increasingly stylized imagery, reaching an apex with the somber, grand, and celebratory compositions for Bertolucci's epic 1900 (1976). Staying close to his genre film roots even as he advanced in art cinema, Morricone provided psychedelic accompaniment for Mario Bava's superhero romp Danger: Diabolik (1968), and crafted a series of evocative scores for Dario Argento's stylized thrillers, including The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1969), The Cat O'Nine Tails (1971), and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1974). Enhancing his international reputation from the 1970s onward, Morricone continued to compose for movies across the artistic spectrum as well as collaborating with an international constellation of directors and stars. Morricone finally received his first Oscar nomination for his magical, pastoral score for Terrence Malick's spectacularly beautiful Days of Heaven (1978).Constantly working and easily shaking off such lows as a Razzie nomination for John Carpenter's remake of The Thing (1982), and the troubled fates of Sam Fuller's provocative race drama White Dog (1982) and Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Morricone hit another career peak in the mid-'80s with directors Roland Joffe and Brian DePalma. Merging Brazilian folk and European liturgical traditions through drums, flutes, oboes, chants, and arrangements of "Ave Maria" and "Te Deum," Morricone's majestic score for Joffe's award-winning epic The Mission (1986) garnered another Oscar nomination and became a soundtrack hit. One of Morricone's personal favorites (along with The Exorcist II), he has said of The Mission that it "represents me nearly completely." Morricone earned another Oscar nod the following year for his lushly orchestral, yet edgy, percussion-driven score for De Palma's popular big screen version of The Untouchables (1987). As with his durable associations with Leone, Bertolucci, and Pasolini, Morricone went on to score Joffe's Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), City of Joy (1992), and Vatel (2000), and De Palma's Casualties of War (1989) and Mission to Mars (2000). Morricone entered into yet another fecund creative partnership in the late '80s with Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988). A favorite of movie music fans, but not one of his Oscar nominations, Morricone's score struck the perfect balance of sentimental, bittersweet nostalgia to accompany Tornatore's paean to cinema. Morricone also scored Tornatore's more downbeat Everybody's Fine (1990), cinema love letter The Star Maker (1995), and earned kudos for his imaginative music for The Legend of 1900 (1998). His work on Tornatore's Malena (2000) earned Morricone his fifth Oscar nomination. After excursions into Shakespeare with Franco Zeffirelli's version of Hamlet (1990) and the dark side of desire with Pedro Almodóvar's sex comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990), Morricone garnered his fourth Oscar nod for his moody, period-tinged score for Barry Levinson's Bugsy (1991). As prolific in the 1990s as ever, Morricone had a happy reunion with Eastwood for the summer hit In the Line of Fire (1993), provided the violins for Bugsy star Warren Beatty's glossy remake of Love Affair (1994), brought out the horror and romance in Mike Nichols' Wolf (1994), ditto for Adrian Lyne's adaptation of Lolita (1997), and scored a docudrama about his erstwhile murdered collaborator Who Killed Pasolini? (1995). Working again with Beatty, Morricone neatly sent up political platitudes with martial horns, drums, and fifes and hauntingly paid tribute to the senator's spirit with soaring yet funereal strings in Beatty's incisive satire Bulworth (1998), earning a Grammy nomination for his work. Even as he began to collect lifetime achievement awards, including a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1995, Morricone continued going strong into the new millennium. Maintaining his presence in European and American cinema through his work with Joffe, De Palma, and Tornatore, Morricone also revisited another past creative relationship when he reunited with The Cannibals (1971) director Liliana Cavani for her adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game (2002). Morricone was awarded an Honorary Oscar in 2006, for, as the Academy put it, "recognition of his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music." As the 21st century rolled forward, Morricone remained as prolific as ever, though shifted his focus somewhat to focus more on telemovies, such as Karol - The Pope, The Man (2006), Memories of Anne Frank (2009), and Napoli milionaria (2011). Around the same time, he also began to score a considerable number of film shorts for the first time in his career. In 2015, Morricone scored Quentin Tarantino's westner-homage The Hateful Eight, his first western score in over 30 years. Morricone won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, making him, at 87, the oldest competitive Oscar.