Ernesto Mahieux

Ernesto Mahieux — Biography

Italian film actor Ernesto Mahieux, sometimes credited as Ernesto Maiè, was born in Naples on July 12, 1946. He left school to work various jobs and spent time living in Milan and Rome before beginning his acting career in the second half of the 1970s, taking on leading comic parts.

Through the 1980s he appeared in productions including Teresa Esposito, Tanti Auguri, and Eternamente, and reached wider audiences with a small role in Ettore Scola's Maccheroni (1985). He kept working steadily through the 1980s and 1990s, and by the 2000s had become one of Italian cinema's recognizable character actors, drawing particular attention as Peppino Profeta in Matteo Garrone's L'imbalsamatore (The Embalmer, 2002).

In the years since he has taken roles in dozens of films, among them Vanilla and Chocolate (2004), I Can See It in Your Eyes (2004), 7/8 (2007), I Trust You (2007), The Trick in the Sheet (2009), and Un Giorno della Vita (2011), continuing his career into the present with Generation 56K (2021) and the 2025 series Sara: Woman in the Shadows.