Beloved in Italy, he was best known as the star of a TV series playing a small-town police chief. He also had a long film career and a popular one-man stage show.
Gigi Proietti, a versatile actor who personified the sardonic, sometimes rough-hewn humor of his fellow Romans and was best known as the star of a long-running television series playing a small-town police chief, died here on Monday, his 80th birthday. The cause was heart failure, said a spokeswoman for the Globe Theater in Rome, where he had been artistic director since 2003. Mr. Proietti began his acting career in Rome’s experimental theater scene but quickly took center stage in a renowned one-man show — a mélange of jokes, traditional songs and touching sketches called “A Me Gli Occhi, Please” (“All Eyes on Me, Please”). The show drew some 500,000 spectators during its run in a Rome circus tent from 1976 to 1978. He became a television star in variety shows, comedies and dramas, mostly on Italy’s national broadcaster. He played the chief in the Carabiniere, Italy’s paramilitary police force, in the hugely popular series “Il Maresciallo Rocca,” a mix of comedy and drama that ran intermittently for five seasons from 1995 to 2006 and continues to be seen in re-runs. Mr. Proietti often played on his Roman roots. “A measured use of dialect adds expressiveness, realism, living flesh to acting,” he wrote in his 2013 autobiography, “Tutto Sommato” (“All Things Considered”). Yet his appeal was nationwide. “Proietti has always represented, with a professionalism equal only to his passion, the prototype of the actor who hams it up, a little vain and contemptuous but highly intelligent, giving the public unforgettable sketches, formidable caricatures and irresistible parodies,” Aldo Grasso, the chief television critic for Milan daily Corriere della Sera, wrote. Rome’s mayor, Virginia Raggi, said Mr. Proietti was “an extraordinary interpreter of the Roman spirit.
