Nino Castelnuovo, Italian actor who played the handsome mechanic opposite Catherine Deneuve in the dazzling musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – obituary

Nino Castelnuovo, who has died aged 84, was an Italian actor best-known internationally for his starring role opposite Catherine Deneuve in the New Wave musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).

One of the most visually ravishing films ever made, Jacques Demy’s masterpiece featured the darkly handsome Castelnuovo as Guy, a young car mechanic in love with the angelic-looking Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) who helps her mother sell umbrellas in their boutique. All the dialogue in the film is sung, like in opera, though Castelnuovo’s voice was dubbed.

Guy is called up to serve in the Algerian War, leaving Geneviève pregnant. By the time they meet again, some years later, they are both married to other people. An affecting modern tale of star-crossed lovers, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, aided by Michel Legrand’s memorably romantic score.

The film – a key influence on Damien Chazelle’s La La Land (2016) – proved to be Catherine Deneuve’s breakthrough performance in France, but it was little noticed by Italian cinemagoers, never fans of musicals and still less of those requiring subtitles.

Instead, Castelnuovo became famous in his homeland three years later via the small screen, in a celebrated adaptation of I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), with Castelnuovo cast as Renzo Tramaglino, the protagonist of Alessandro Manzoni’s classic novel.

Published in 1827, and known to every Italian from the schoolroom, it is set in early 17th-century Italy and is most renowned for its depiction of Milan in the grip of the plague. One fan of the series was Pope Paul VI, who enjoined Castelnuovo on meeting him to be as morally sound in his outlook as Renzo. “You, too,” retorted the actor.

The second of four children, he was born Francesco Castelnuovo on October 28 1936 in Lecco, on Lake Como. His father worked in a button factory and his mother was a housemaid.

Nino studied dance and gymnastics, but began to pay his own way while still at school. After moving to Milan at 19, he supported himself with odd jobs as a mechanic and house painter while learning his craft at the Piccolo Teatro presided over by the director Giorgio Strehler.

He made his cinematic debut with minor roles in Pietro Germi’s The Facts of Murder (1959) and in Rocco and His Brothers (1960), made by Luchino Visconti.

Although he would go on to appear in more than 50 films, including Agnès Varda’s The Creatures (1966), Castelnuovo’s cinematic career was patchy. Despite the lustre he had gained from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, A New World (1965) proved a rare misfire for the director Vittorio De Sica. Castelnuovo was perhaps unfortunate that he came to the fore as the quality of Italian films began to diminish.

On television, however, he worked steadily, although he was haunted by two commercials that defined his image. The first, in the late 1960s, with the actress Laura Antonelli, was for Coca-Cola. In the second, which ran from the late 1970s for almost a decade, he extolled the virtues of a brand of maize oil by vaulting athletically over a fence – no mean feat in mid-life but one thereafter much parodied.

In 1976, his brother Pierantonio was beaten to death after trying to quieten a rowdy group of revellers at a festival. The actor’s other brother, Clemente, died in a car accident in 1994.

Castelnuovo himself was progressively afflicted by glaucoma from the age of 35. He continued to work on television and in the theatre, and in 1996 played an Italian archaeologist in the film of The English Patient, but his loss of sight meant that latterly he had been living in straitened circumstances.

He is survived by his second wife, Maria Cristina di Nicola, whom he married in 2010, and by the son of his first marriage, Lorenzo, who lives in Scotland.

Nino Castelnuovo, born October 28 1936, died September 6 2021