George Eastman

George Eastman — Biography

Born Luigi Montefiori in Genoa on 16 August 1942, George Eastman trained at Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and at Alessandro Fersen's drama school. He adopted the Americanized stage name when he began playing heavies in spaghetti westerns in the late 1960s, and in 1972 played the villain opposite Charlton Heston in The Call of the Wild. A collaboration with director Joe D'Amato that began in 1975 made him a fixture of early-1980s Italian B-cinema, where his towering height and dark looks kept him cast as a menace in science-fiction titles such as 1990: The Bronx Warriors, The New Barbarians, Endgame and Ironmaster.

His most remembered role came as the cannibalistic killer in the 1980 horror film Antropophagus, and he returned to a similar part, again on his own script, in Absurd. He played Goliath in Paramount's 1985 biblical film King David and appeared in Pupi Avati's Regalo di Natale in 1986. After writing and directing Metamorphosis in 1990 he stepped back from acting to focus on screenwriting, returning briefly to the screen in 2003 for another Avati film. He died in Rome on 20 May 2026.