Rupert Sciamenna, born Franco Mari, Italian actor and comedian, face of the sketches and two films by the Theatine comedian and director Maccio Capatonda, has died. Marcello Macchia and Luigi Luciano, better known by the pseudonym Herbert Ballerina, another protagonist of the products made by Maccio, announced his passing on social media.
“Unfortunately Rupert Sciamenna (Franco Mari) has passed away. A comedy legend”, wrote Marcello Macchia on the evening of Saturday 25 October.
“Unfortunately, the legendary Rubert Sciamenna has left us!”, said Luigi Luciano, originally from Campobasso, who spent his summers in Francavilla al Mare in a post on Instagram. “These were my beginnings – he continues – and I am happy to have lived them together with him. Franco was the youngest of us, even if he seemed the “oldest” in the world, with his strange elegance and that absurd voice. We came a long way together, and if today I look back I only think of how lucky we were to meet in that corner of time and of the world. We didn’t understand him but we had changed something, people on the street spoke like him. In this photo we are on the set of the legendary Christmas in the toilet! Hi Franco.”
Franco Mari was born in Milan in 1942, to an Italian mother and a father with Swiss citizenship. Having approached the world of cinema in the 1980s, when he started working as an extra, his face had become familiar thanks to Marcello Macchia’s project: he was a regular presence in videos with Maccio Capatonda, Herbert Ballerina and Ivo Avido (theatine Enrico Venti).
