Renato Casaro, 'Michelangelo of Movie Posters,' Dies at 89

Summary

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 c...