Page "Terence Hill" Paragraph 1

Hill was born in Venice, Italy.

His mother was German, his father an Italian chemist.

As a child, he lived in the small town of Lommatzsch, Germany from 1943 to 1945 during World War II, surviving the Dresden Bombing.

After being discovered by Italian filmmaker Dino Risi for Vacanze col Gangster ( Holiday with the Gangster, 1951 ) at an early age of 12, he had, after 27 movies in Italy ( including Gli sbandati ), a major film role in Luchino Visconti's The Leopard ( Il Gattopardo, 1963 ).

In 1964, he returned to Germany and there, appeared in a series of Heimatfilmen, adventure and western films, made after novels by German author Karl May.

In 1967, he returned to Italy to act in God Forgives ...

I Don't!

( Dio perdona ... Io no !, 1968 ).

He changed his name to Terence Hill in the same year.

The name was made up, as a publicity stunt, by the film producers ; he had to choose from a list of twenty names and picked the one with his mother's initials.

In a Q & A, he dismissed as a journalist's invention the rumour that it might have been taken from the Roman playwright Terence and his wife's surname ( his wife was Lori Zwicklbauer ; she later took her husband's surname ).