Riccardo Bertoni

He was the first to cast Sharon Stone in a film ("Stardust Memories," 1980) and over the course of his thirty-year career in Hollywood, he oversaw the casting of dozens of feature films, including "9 1/2 Weeks," "Fatal Attraction," "Die Hard with a Vengeance," "Godzilla," and "Unfaithful." Riccardo Bertoni —born in Lugano on November 8, 1933—moved to Italy at a young age and studied acting under Federico Fellini and Anna Magnani. His first role saw him share the screen with Marcello Mastroianni in 1957 ("The Girl from the Salt Pans"), but shortly thereafter he moved to New York and began a fruitful collaboration with Woody Allen . In the early 1970s, he began working as a casting director with a major debut: Francis Ford Coppola's " The Godfather " in 1972. After giving a role to a then-unknown Stone in 1980, in the mid-1990s, the Ticinese co-founded the Navarro Bertoni Casting Company in his adopted hometown, the Big Apple. His final breakthrough was playing the butler in his friend Allen's 2000 film " The Godfather "; Bertoni died three years later of cancer.