Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#3824
of 909177 performers
Top 1%
Franco Nero represents the rare performer whose career became more ambitious with every decade — 60 years in, and Franco is still choosing the harder script.
The essay
Our editors on the work, the patterns and the reason this body of work holds together.
Franco Nero appears in 24 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Franco. We Are Cinema is the clearest case: a film rated 9.5 by our editors, where the performance carries weight the script only implies.
The recognisable elements are versatility, transformation, quiet performance. Watch two of these films back to back and the method separates from the material — the same instrument, tuned differently for crime, drama, thriller. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with Robert Port, Joshua Sinclair, Marco Kreuzpaintner and others, Franco Nero helped set a standard other performers now audition against. Awards bodies have been slower than the work, which is usually the sign of a career built on choices rather than campaigns.
We Are Cinema (2021) as Self (archive footage) · Django Unchained (2012) as Amerigo Vessepi · The Collini Case (2019) as Fabrizio Collini
Career snapshot
Ranked #3824 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
24
1966–2026
Career length
60 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
9.5
We Are Cinema
Average Nutevio score
6.3
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
9.5
We Are Cinema
Most frequent director
Robert Port
1 film together
Longest collaboration
1×
With Robert Port
Most common genre
Drama
12 titles
Average runtime
1h 53m
Across catalogue work
Golden Globe wins
—
Unknown
Nutevio metric
Ten weighted categories, applied identically to everyone we cover.
Nutevio Performer Score
7.0
out of 10
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio metric
Cultural impact and legacy, measured separately from craft — how far the work travelled once it left the cinema.
Nutevio Influence Score
7.0
out of 10
A quieter influence — felt inside the films rather than across the industry.
How far the work travelled past the people who saw it first.
What survives once the release-week conversation has burned off.
Institutional acknowledgement, weighted but never decisive.
Years of chosen, relevant work rather than years merely employed.
Statuettes, read as evidence rather than verdict.
Roles named without needing the film named alongside them.
Directors who wrote parts because this performer existed.
The reading other performers now have to answer.
Actor DNA
A fingerprint derived from the roles themselves — register, range and the kind of film they carry.
The shape of a career
Every performance plotted in time. Hover a point to read the title behind it.
Peak years
Where the scores, the awards and the sheer volume of work agree with each other.
Best decade
1990s
7.1 average MV
The 1990s are where the work and the material meet. Die Hard 2 — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
1990s
7.1
Across 1 catalogue film in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
1990s
7.0
The public agrees most strongly about this stretch — useful context, and occasionally a decade behind our own reading.
Most awarded era
1960s
0 Academy Awards
Statuettes for the films themselves, which is the honest way to read an ensemble career. Camelot, The Bible: In the Beginning..., Django.
Most productive era
2010s
9 films
The busiest stretch of the catalogue — volume that reads as appetite rather than availability.
Range, mapped
Genres down the side, decades across the top. Warmer cells mean stronger titles.
| Genre | 1960s | 1970s | 1990s | 2010s | 2020s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drama | 7.01 film | 6.52 films | — | 7.05 films | 4.24 films |
| Action | 7.01 film | 6.71 film | 7.11 film | 7.31 film | — |
| Thriller | — | — | 7.11 film | 6.53 films | 4.75 films |
| Comedy | — | — | — | 6.73 films | 2.02 films |
| Crime | — | — | — | 7.31 film | 5.51 film |
| Romance | 6.31 film | — | — | 6.82 films | — |
| Horror | — | — | — | — | 3.52 films |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio
1966The Bible: In the Beginning...
Where our catalogue meets this career, as Abel.
First Nutevio masterpiece · Highest rated performance · Career peak
2021We Are Cinema
The first film here to clear 9.0 on our scale — a threshold fewer than one film in ten reaches. 9.5 on the Nutevio scale, the top of the catalogue for this performer. Weighing billing against the film's own quality, this is the point where everything aligned at once.
Most recent film
2026Roma elastica
The current state of the argument, as The Old Filmmaker.
Our order
Every performance in the catalogue, ordered by Nutevio Score.
Every title
Filter by genre or decade, and compare any two titles side by side.
24 of 24 films
as Self (archive footage)
Directed by Unknown
as Amerigo Vessepi
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
as Django
Directed by Sergio Corbucci
as Keoma
Directed by Enzo G. Castellari
From the library
Every movie and TV credit stored for this name in the Nutevio catalogue — filter by media, role or sort by rating.
Loading credits…
The defining work
#1
Self (archive footage)
We Are Cinema (2021)
Performance score9.1
The performance the rest of the career is read through. Self (archive footage) gives Franco Nero a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Amerigo Vessepi
Django Unchained (2012)
Performance score8.1
Django Unchained asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Amerigo Vessepi is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
Django
Django (1966)
Performance score7.6
Django asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Django is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#4
Self - Actor
Django & Django: Sergio Corbucci Unchained (2021)
Performance score7.4
Django & Django: Sergio Corbucci Unchained asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Self - Actor is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movieStart here
A guided path through the work, ordered so each film explains the next.
Best entry point
as Self (archive footage)
Start here. We Are Cinema is the clearest statement of what Franco Nero does — accessible, 71 minutes, and rated 9.5 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Franco at the most legible performance, then move forward in time so each film reads as a response to the one before it rather than a repetition of it.
Django (1966)
A deliberate change of key after We Are Cinema — same instrument, unfamiliar tuning, and the reason range gets mentioned.
Keoma (1976)
Keeps the action register of Django but asks for a colder reading of it.
Django Unchained (2012)
Keeps the western register of Keoma but asks for a colder reading of it.
Django & Django: Sergio Corbucci Unchained (2021)
A deliberate change of key after Django Unchained — same instrument, unfamiliar tuning, and the reason range gets mentioned.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Sergio Corbucci
Director
1 film together
Notably Django
John Huston
Director
1 film together
Notably The Bible: In the Beginning...
Joshua Logan
Director
1 film together
Notably Camelot
Enzo G. Castellari
Director
1 film together
Notably Keoma
Guy Hamilton
Director
1 film together
Notably Force 10 from Navarone
Renny Harlin
Director
1 film together
Notably Die Hard 2
John Lasseter
Director
1 film together
Notably Cars 2
Quentin Tarantino
Director
1 film together
Notably Django Unchained
Chad Stahelski
Director
1 film together
Notably John Wick: Chapter 2
Marco Kreuzpaintner
Director
1 film together
Notably The Collini Case
Joshua Sinclair
Director
1 film together
Notably A Rose in Winter
Robert Port
Director
1 film together
Notably Recon
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Quentin Tarantino
Director
1 film together · 8.4 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Django UnchainedMarco Kreuzpaintner
Director
1 film together · 7.4 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
The Collini CaseChad Stahelski
Director
1 film together · 7.3 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
John Wick: Chapter 2Renny Harlin
Director
1 film together · 7.1 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Die Hard 2John Huston
Director
1 film together · 7.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
The Bible: In the Beginning...Sergio Corbucci
Director
1 film together · 7.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
DjangoEnzo G. Castellari
Director
1 film together · 6.7 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
KeomaJohn Lasseter
Director
1 film together · 6.4 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Cars 2Guy Hamilton
Director
1 film together · 6.3 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Force 10 from NavaroneJoshua Logan
Director
1 film together · 6.3 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
CamelotJoshua Sinclair
Director
1 film together · 6.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
A Rose in WinterRobert Port
Director
1 film together · 4.9 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
ReconSix degrees
Follow the thread outward — director, film, co-star, and the film after that.
Categories of our own
Six editorial categories we apply to every performer we cover.
Most rewatchable
We Are Cinema
as Self (archive footage)
The one that survives a fourth viewing. Nothing in the performance depends on surprise, which is why it keeps paying out.
Most emotional performance
The Bible: In the Beginning...
as Abel
Grief played at conversational volume. The film never asks the audience to cry; the performance simply makes it difficult not to.
Most influential performance
We Are Cinema
as Self (archive footage)
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
We Are Cinema
as Self (archive footage)
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
We Are Cinema
as Self (archive footage)
If the career had to be argued in a single scene, our editors would pick one from this film and rest the case.
In their films' words
“You can build a whole film around a performer who knows when not to speak. Franco Nero has known it for a long time.”
Head to head
Put two careers on the same scale and see where the argument actually sits.
Ours alone
Recognitions handed out by this desk, on criteria no awards body uses.
Career Achievement
Awarded
60 years of relevant work — not merely a long career, but a long career of choices.
Modern Classic Performer
Awarded
Defining performances delivered inside the last twenty-five years, in films already being taught rather than merely remembered.
Drama Legend
Awarded
12 catalogue titles in drama, each one a reference point for the films that followed.
Our desk
Best ending, best opening, best twist and the rest — categories we apply to everyone we cover.
Best ending
We Are Cinema
as Self (archive footage)
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
We Are Cinema
as Self (archive footage)
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
The Lost City of Z
as Baron de Gondoriz
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
The Man from Rome
as The Pope
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
We Are Cinema
as Self (archive footage)
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
Keoma
as Keoma
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
Letters to Juliet
as Lorenzo
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
Django Unchained
as Amerigo Vessepi
The public vote sits below ours on this one, and the direction is the reason for the gap.
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Tom Hanks
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Bonnie Hunt
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Have your say
Community
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Reference
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