Renato Casaro, an artist who was called “the Michelangelo of movie posters” and whose work extended from the spaghetti western era of the 1960s through Hollywood blockbusters like the “Rambo” series and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” died on Sept. 30 at a hospital in Treviso, Italy. He was 89.
His daughter, Silvia Casaro, confirmed the death.
During a career that lasted more than a half a century, Mr. Casaro produced some 2,000 posters, drawing praise from Hollywood heavyweights like Quentin Tarantino and Sylvester Stallone.
Yet despite his clout within the industry, few moviegoers knew his name. His work was largely unheralded, aside from a tiny “Casaro” printed in the margins. In a 2021 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Casaro said he believed that the only director who put him in the end credits was Sergio Leone, for the poster promoting the star-studded 1984 mob epic “Once Upon a Time in America.”
Mr. Casaro had made his name in the 1960s with Mr. Leone’s Italian productions of classic American spurs-and-six-guns movies, including three that made Clint Eastwood a star: “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “For a Few Dollars More” (1965) and “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” (1966).
“Of all the directors I have worked with,” Mr. Casaro said in a 2022 interview with The Guardian, “Sergio Leone was the best collaborator. We were the perfect couple: one heart, one soul.”
Mr. Casaro also created posters — sometimes alternates or for international releases — for John Huston (“The Bible: In the Beginning,” 1966), Francis Ford Coppola (“The Godfather Part III,” 1990), David Lynch (“Dune,” 1984, and “Wild at Heart,” 1990) and Bernardo Bertolucci (“The Last Emperor,” 1987, and “The Sheltering Sky,” 1990).
In his view, a good movie poster was like bait on a fishhook. The challenge, he told The Times in 2021, was to “capture the essential: that moment, that glance, that attitude, that movement that says everything and condenses the entire story.”
Before software and digital graphics came to define — and, some would say, ruin — the art of the poster, Mr. Casaro worked in traditional fashion, with brushes and tempera paint, giving his early pieces what he called an “impressionistic” look. He eventually turned to the airbrush, which gave his work a sharper realism but was also “more magical.”
His superhuman rendering of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a horned helmet, sword aloft, for “Conan the Barbarian” (1982) and his blood-and-guts rendition of Mr. Stallone, rippling with muscles, for the “Rambo” movies, made them look like gods worthy of Mount Olympus.
“Schwarzenegger was the perfect man to paint,” Mr. Casaro told The Guardian in 2022. “He had a tough expression. His face was like a sculpture.”
And Mr. Stallone, he said, “gave me the freedom to interpret all the images of Rambo I had as I wished. All I had to do was make him look like a hero.”
A personal favorite of Mr. Casaro’s was his poster for “Nikita,” a 1990 action thriller from Luc Besson titled “La Femme Nikita” in the United States, about an assassin with supermodel looks and a supersized handgun.
The poster “shows a woman with her back turned behind a bathroom door,” he said on the TV show “CBS Mornings” in 2023. “‘What just happened here?’ The viewer goes to see what this film is all about.”
Renato Casaro was born on Oct. 26, 1935, in Treviso, where he got his start in the movie business as a teenager, drawing posters for the Garibaldi Theater in exchange for free admission to movies.
In 1954, he moved to Rome, taking a job as a staff artist for a prominent advertising studio that specialized in movie posters. Three years later, he opened his own shop.
“You learn on the job,” he told The Times in 2021. “You have to be able to draw everything, from a portrait to a horse to a lion.”
His big break — creating the poster for Mr. Huston’s sweeping 1966 adaptation of Genesis, starring Richard Harris as Cain and the director as Noah — came through a longtime professional relationship with the Italian film producer Dino De Laurentiis, known for big-budget spectacles. As The Guardian noted in 2022, the enormous billboard that loomed over Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles for months functioned as much as an advertisement for the up-and-coming poster artist as it did for the movie.
Other notable posters included a bodice-ripper of an image for the steamy 1981 remake of “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” starring Jack Nicholson, Jessica Lange and a kitchen table; a retro, Hitchcockian collage for the 1981 Brian De Palma thriller “Blow Out,” starring John Travolta and Nancy Allen; and an action-packed illustration for “Octopussy” that made the rather forgettable 1983 Roger Moore installment of the James Bond series look like an epic on the order of “Lawrence of Arabia.”
During the 1990s, work began to dry up, as the industry turned to Photoshop and other computer software, which made it “very easy to generate a spectacular image,” Mr. Casaro told “CBS Mornings,” “but with no soul.”
Not for nothing did a 2021 retrospective of his work in Treviso bill him as “cinema’s last poster designer.”
Mr. Casaro’s work was not forgotten, though, by Mr. Tarantino, one of Hollywood’s ultimate film geeks, who sought him out to produce vintage-style spaghetti western posters for the fictional movies starring Rick Dalton, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in “Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood” (2019). (With his fame dwindling stateside, Dalton defibrillates his career by moving to Italy to star in shoot-’em-ups like “Kill Me Now Ringo, Said the Gringo.”)
After production, Mr. Tarantino sent Mr. Casaro a signed photo of Mr. DiCaprio posing for one of the posters, with a note reading: “Thanks so much for your art gracing my picture. You’ve always been my favorite.”
A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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