Umberto Sclanizza

Umberto Sclanizza (1893–1951) was an Italian theatre and cinema actor from Friuli Venezia Giulia. His film work straddles a period in Italian cinema, 1936–1943, when the industry was largely devoted to the production of mildly propagandistic works, such as Il Re d'Inghilterra non paga (The King of England Will Not Pay) (1941). This type of old-fashioned classical drama, often infused with thinly-veiled Axis sympathies, was to indirectly pave the way for the Italian Neorealism movement, which rejected the melodrama style and consigned it to the industry's past.