Alberto Collo

Biography

A wheat-field boy from Piobesi Torinese, Alberto Collo first saw daylight on 6 July 1883. Within three decades he had traded village dust for klieg lights, stepping before the camera as the tormented Oberdan, the consumptive Armand in Camille, and the scandalous heroine’s confidant in The Woman Who Dared—three 1915 releases that pinned his face to the flickering map of Italian silent cinema. When the projectors finally dimmed, he returned to his native Turin and, on 7 May 1955, closed his eyes for the last time in the same city that once sent him off to the world.