Terence Hill Biography

MARITAL STATUS
Professions Actor , Director , Collaboration on the screenplay more
Birth name Mario Girotti
Nationalities Italian, German
Birth March 29, 1939 (Venice – Italy)

BIOGRAPHY
Born in Venice to a German mother and an Italian engineer, the young Terence Hill, who was still called Mario Girotti at the time, was first and foremost a top athlete. As a child, he excelled in swimming, a discipline he practiced in the early 1950s alongside a certain Carlo Pedersoli, better known today as… Bud Spencer . Later, these two will meet on screen to form a legendary duo. But the young Terence Hill was initially more attracted to the pools than to the sets, and it took chance – the arrival of Dino Risi at a swimming competition – for him to discover cinema. Aged 12, he was chosen by the Italian filmmaker to play one of the five children in the film Vacanze col gangster .

Terence Hill’s career was launched and, in parallel with his literary studies, he appeared in around thirty Italian films, notably working for Vittorio De Sica ( The Lovers of Villa Borghese ), Mario Bava ( The Thousand and One Nights ) and even Carmine Gallone ( Carthage in Flames ). These were nevertheless minor roles, and it was not until 1963, with a supporting role in The Leet by Luchino Visconti , that things accelerated. After making adventure films in Germany, he returned to his native Italy in 1967 and starred in God Forgives, Me Not , which marked the first of his seventeen collaborations with Bud Spencer . It was with this film that Mario Girotti decided to Americanize his name to adopt that of Terence Hill, chosen in particular because it bears the same initials as that of his mother.

Thanks to the duo he formed with Bud Spencer for around twenty years, between 1967 and 1985, Terence Hill became an international star. The action films and spaghetti westerns which feature them, most of the time schoolboys, work on the same principle: he is the great seducer with blue eyes, and Spencer, the big placid one who throws donuts galore ( although Hill also distributes a few!). Trinita is going to break everything (and its consequences), Be careful, we’re going to get angry! , Two super-cops or Ass and shirt , Even and odd and When you have to go, you have to go! : the duo has a string of successes and marks, seemingly innocuously and in its own way, the history of mainstream comedy.

If the name of Terence Hill is inseparably linked to that of Bud Spencer (and vice versa), the actor nevertheless manages to forge a solid solo career. The high point of this is undoubtedly the spaghetti western My Name is Nobody (1973), in which he plays a young adventurer and where he opposite Henry Fonda . We also find him alongside Miou-Miou in A Genius, Two Associates, a Bell or rubbing shoulders with Ernest Borgnine in A Funny Cop .

Particularly active, Terence Hill also shines behind the camera, giving himself the title roles of Lucky Luke and Don Camillo , while taking care to reform his duo with Spencer in 1994 for the needs of Petit papa baston . A great figure in popular comedy, the Italian gradually abandoned the big screen to devote himself to television, where he distinguished himself in Italian series, notably Don Matteo / A Sacred Detective , which saw him play a… detective priest.

Biography written by Clément Cuyer