Leopoldo Trieste (1917-2003) was an Italian stage actor, playwright, screenwriter and director. As a man of cinema and theatre of Magna Graecia origins he was member of the Italian delegation of the Magna Grecia International Association, chaired by President Nino Foti, which organized the Magna Grecia International Week in Buenos Aires in 1999.

Trieste was the son of a woman of the good bourgeoisie of Scilla, Santa Barresi, and of a railway worker from Reggio Calabria. In the 1930s, their house in the Calopinacee district was frequented by Salvatore Quasimodo, whom in those years was employed in the civil engineering department of Reggio Emilia and was attracted to the Trieste house by the piano of Leopoldo's sister, Vera. When he was only ten years old, Leopoldo Trieste lost his father, from whom, however, despite his young age, he inherited a passion for antiquarian bookshops and libraries, as well as an idea of brotherhood nurtured towards beloved writers, eclectically extended to scientific disciplines, from astrophysics to geology. The absence of his father severely affected the family, which plunged into full economic poverty. It was in fact thanks to his paternal uncle, Turi, a well-read man, an officer in the Merchant Navy and radio operator on cruise ships, able to read James Joyce's "Ulysses" in the original language which was unknown in Italy at the time. It was his uncle who helped him morally and economically in his vocation as a precocious playwright, when he was still a student at the Campanella high school. Precisely for this purpose, his uncle pushed his sister-in-law to move to Rome in 1935, to allow his eighteen-year-old nephew, to follow a more qualified stage and enrol in the Faculty of Letters of the Sapienza University. He thus began to frequent the large community of southern intellectuals operating in the capital, including Salvatore Quasimodo. Trieste graduated in 1939 with Natalino Sapegno and Mario Praz as second supervisors, discussing a thesis on the sixteenth-century poet Luigi Tansillo that earned him enrolment in postgraduate studies. The ethnologist Raffaele Pettazzoni awarded him a scholarship to Boston, but the outbreak WW2 thwarted this opportunity: he was drafted and, after becoming a sergeant in 1944, he deserted to return to Rome.

His artistic training was closely linked to the events of the time and the war, so much so that the presence of Jewish ancestry in the Trieste family tree affected the family in the immediate collection of all the registry documents, in order to avoid the persecution of the racial laws and suffer the dreaded concentration camps. In the post-war period, Leopoldo Trieste provided the theatre with a trilogy on war and violence, debuting in 1945 with La Frontiera, the drama of a veteran who anticipated the fall of the borders, followed by Cronaca, a play published in 1947 that was the first in the world to tackle the tragedy of the Holocaust. In that same year in Milan, Trieste met famous director Federico Fellini who opened the doors of cinema to him and launched him as a full-time interpreter in several films including Lo Sceicco Bianco (1952) and I vitelloni (1953). On the set of Lo Sceicco Bianco he met Alberto Sordi with whom he inaugurated a successful partnership that resulted in the making of nine films including Un Americano a Roma (1954), Un Giorno in Pretura (1954) and Il Moralista (1959). In 1956 he directed Città di notte with music by Nino Rota and, in 1960, Il Peccato Degli Anni Verdi. Subsequently, he devoted himself entirely to his career as a character actor, featuring in several Italian comedies such as Divorzio All’Italiana (1961), Sedotta e abbandonata (1964) with the consolidated collaboration of Stefania Sandrelli, Il medico della mutua (1968) and Il marchese del Grillo (1981). Among the films to remember, Il Nome Della Rosa (1986), Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988), Il Giudice Bambino (1994), Marianna Ucria (1997), L’Uomo Delle Stelle (1996) for which he was presented with the David di Donatello Award and the Nastro D’Argento for best supporting actor, up to the most recent Il Consiglio D’Egitto (2001) and Il Ritorno Di Cagliostro (2002) by Ciprì and Maresco.

During his career, Trieste also worked with foreign directors of the calibre of Stanley Kramer, Charles Vidor, Renè Clement and Francis Coppola, participating for the latter in the well-known Godfather Part II. Thanks to his artistic skills, Trieste often appeared on television in the dramas Signora Ava, Don Giovanni in Sicilia, and Quo vadis?. Most recently, he also appeared in the episode Il Cane Di Terracotta as part of the TV series on Inspector Montalbano, inspired by the Andrea Camilleri novels.

After a life spent working for the cinema, he returned to the theatre, writing a couple of plays.

He died suddenly one night in Rome, at the age of 85.