Enzo Staiola, who played the staunch 8-year-old accompanying his father on a quest to recover a stolen bicycle in Vittorio De Sica’s classic 1948 film, “Bicycle Thieves,” died on June 4 in Rome. He was 85.
His death, in a hospital, was widely reported in the Italian press.
The father’s character, played by a sad-eyed real-life factory worker, Lamberto Maggiorani, is the star of the film, which was originally released in the United States as “The Bicycle Thief” and is routinely cited as one of the greatest films of all time.
But Mr. Staiola (pronounced STY-ola), who played the child, Bruno, is in many ways the emotional center of De Sica’s work, which is considered a founding document of Italian neorealism and “a fundamental staging post in the history of the European cinema,” the film historian Robert S.C. Gordon wrote in his 2008 book, “Bicycle Thieves.”
The story, set in impoverished postwar Rome, revolves around Antonio Ricci, Mr. Maggiorani’s struggling character, who must get his bicycle back to keep his new job hanging advertising bills around the city. The job requires the use of a bicycle. But he must also retrieve the bike to avoid disappointing his trusting son.
The character of Bruno is portrayed with poise and vulnerability by a little boy who, until then, had been more interested in playing soccer in his working-class Roman neighborhood than in acting.
The father’s quest, unfolding through a series of sharply etched mishaps in the streets of the city, takes on weight for the audience as the despair becomes not just that of an adult but also of a plucky boy with expressive eyes, the young Mr. Staiola.
The film’s emotional impact, which was felt immediately by contemporary critics and helped it garner an Academy Award in 1950, is due in considerable part to this portrait of disillusioned innocence.
The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called the film “brilliant and devastating” on its U.S. release in 1949 and singled out the young Mr. Staiola, noting that he played Ricci’s “small son with a firmness that fully reveals the rugged determination and yet the latent sensitivity of the lad.”
Mr. Crowther called one episode, in which Ricci, desperate in his frustration, slaps the little boy, “one of the most overpowering incidents in the film.” Other scenes show the child stoically enduring rain, jeers from bicycle-part peddlers, the scorn of diners in a restaurant and the disapproval of church officials as he supports his father unwaveringly in the search.
As those scenes unfold, the boy becomes his father’s emotional equal. When first seen, Bruno is depicted as a little man, dressed in overalls, tending to his father’s bike like an adult mechanic, serious and earnest.
The film — which was pioneering in its use of nonprofessional actors, its frank portrayal of poverty and its refusal to romanticize the Roman streetscape — made De Sica the king of Italian cinema, at least until Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini came along. But neither Mr. Maggiorani nor Mr. Staiola ever again matched that brush with stardom.
Mr. Staiola appeared in a handful of other films as a child in the 1950s, including “The Barefoot Contessa” (1954), with Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner, but he later lived out his days as a clerk in Rome’s land-registry office. Without regret, it would seem, at least in his telling, in a 2023 interview with the newspaper La Repubblica.
“As a kid, I could never play with my friends, because if I made a mark on my face I couldn’t make movies anymore,” Mr. Staiola said. “Then it was also a bit boring; the waiting times in cinema are very long.”
The young Enzo was plucked from the streets by De Sica on the boy’s way home from school. By then, the director had already begun filming “Bicycle Thieves,” his adaptation of an obscure 1946 novel of the same title by Luigi Bartolini.
“I was coming back from school, and at a certain point I noticed this big car following me at walking pace,” Mr. Staiola said in the 2023 interview. “Then this gentleman with gray hair, all dressed up, got out and asked me, ‘What’s your name?’ and I was silent. And he said, ‘But don’t you talk?’”
As Mr. Staiola recalled, he answered, “I don’t feel like talking.”
The man, who turned out to be De Sica, followed him home. In Italy, De Sica had been a film star for years, and Mr. Staiola’s parents immediately recognized him. Still, persuading them to let their son act in his film was a challenge.
“The next day, he held auditions, though, in the Via Capo d’Africa,” Mr. Staiola said in a 2016 television interview. “He knew that was where I lived. He came up to me and said, ‘He’s the one.’”
Mr. Staiola auditioned for over a month, along with another candidate, he said, and “in the end they picked me.” His rival was given a bicycle as a consolation prize, which Mr. Staiola said he would have preferred to winning the role.
A monetary offer of what Mr. Staiola called “an exaggerated sum” helped persuade his parents.
But his memories of making the film were not fond ones. “De Sica was strict,” he recalled in the 2023 interview. “He always told me, ‘Do this, do that.’ Sometimes he offended me.”
Enzo Staiola was born on Nov. 15, 1939, in Rome, one of five children of Otello Staiola, an ad-hoc talent scout for the Cinecittà film studio, and Rosa Staiola, a fruit seller.
He grew up in the San Giovanni neighborhood, he said, in a small two-room apartment. After “Bicycle Thieves,” the family was given a public housing apartment in the Garbatella neighborhood, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Mr. Staiola told La Repubblica that he had acted in “about 20” films, including “Volcano” (1950), “The White Line” (1950) and “I’ll Get You for This” (1951).
He went on to graduate from what he called a “technical institute,” he told La Repubblica, and in the 1970s took the state exam to become a land-registry clerk. In later life, after retiring, he hung out at a cafe in Garbatella, satisfying the curiosity of the occasional journalist and passer-by.
His wife, Anna, whom he met at the cafe, died some years ago. He is survived by his son, Andrea.
In 1988, Italy issued a postage stamp of the young Enzo Staiola.
“Not bad, eh?” he said to La Repubblica. “Nice recognition.”
But he wondered, for much of his life, why De Sica had chosen him.
“Maybe he liked the look in my eyes,” he said in 2016. “I think De Sica picked me because I was just an ordinary person. Poverty was all around us, and I represented poverty.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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