Alan Steel

Alan Steel — Biography

Italian actor Alan Steel, born Sergio Ciani in Rome on 7 September 1935, is best remembered as one of the leading faces of the sword-and-sandal (peplum) film boom of the early 1960s. A former bodybuilder, he began his screen career as a stuntman, working as the body double for Steve Reeves on two productions and taking a small on-screen part in one of them.

Adopting the stage name Alan Steel in the early 1960s, he moved into leading roles and became one of the few Italian-born actors to headline the genre's mythological strongmen, appearing under names such as Hercules, Ursus and Samson across a run of commercially successful pictures. Later in the decade he turned to crime and adventure fare, including a police thriller and a crime picture, and also appeared in a cowboy feature that also played in Turkey. In 1976 he stepped outside the peplum mould to play Robin Hood in an adventure film. As audience interest in the genre faded, his screen appearances thinned out and he retired from acting by the end of the 1970s. He died in his sleep at his home in Ostia, near Rome, on 5 September 2015, two days short of his 80th birthday.