Benito Stefanelli

Benito Stefanelli — Biography

Benito Stefanelli was born in Rome on 2 September 1928 and became one of Italian cinema's most active stunt performers, also serving as a weapons instructor and taking occasional acting roles. Between 1955 and 1991 he appeared on screen in more than sixty productions, most of them within the Italian western genre, and he is chiefly remembered for his repeated work alongside director Sergio Leone. He played one of the outlaw henchmen in each installment of Leone's so-called Dollars trilogy — A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — and also had a part in Once Upon a Time in the West. Through the 1960s and into the early 1970s he simultaneously worked behind the scenes as a stunt coordinator on many of the same westerns. Fluent in English, he is said to have acted as an interpreter for Clint Eastwood during the filming of A Fistful of Dollars. Stefanelli died in Rome on 18 December 1999.