Francesco Clemente Giuseppe Sparanero (born 23 November 1941), known professionally as Franco Nero, is an Italian actor.

[1] During the 1960s and 1970s, Nero was actively involved in many popular Italian "genre trends", including polizieschi, gialli and Spaghetti Westerns.

His best-known films include: The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966), Camelot (1967), The Day of the Owl (1968), The Mercenary (1968), Battle of Neretva (1969), Tristana (1970), Compañeros (1970), Confessions of a Police Captain (1971), The Fifth Cord (1971), High Crime (1973), Street Law (1974), Keoma (1976), Hitch-Hike (1977), Force 10 from Navarone (1978), Enter the Ninja (1981), Die Hard 2 (1990), Letters to Juliet (2010), Cars 2 (2011), John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017), and The Pope's Exorcist (2023).

Francesco Clemente Giuseppe Sparanero[2][3][4][5][6] was born in San Prospero Parmense (Parma, Emilia-Romagna), the son of a commissioned officer in the Carabinieri.

[15] A lack of proficiency in English tended to limit these roles, although Nero also appeared in other English-language films including The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970), Force 10 from Navarone (1978), Enter the Ninja (1981) and Die Hard 2 (1990).

[16] Although often typecast in films like Los amigos (1973) or Keoma (1976) he has attempted an impressive range of characters, such as Abel in John Huston's epic The Bible: In The Beginning (1966), the humiliated engineer out for revenge in Street Law, the gay lieutenant in Querelle (1982), and Serbian mediaeval hero in The Falcon (1983).

[17] More recently, Nero starred in Hungarian director Koltay Gábor [hu]'s Honfoglalás (Conquest) in 1996, in Li chiamarono... briganti!

[citation needed] In 2009, Nero played an eccentric author called "Mario Puzzo" in Mord ist mein Geschäft, Liebling ("Murder is my trade, darling", Italian title "Tesoro, sono un killer").

[24][25] Nero appears in the dark comedy feature film The Immortalist in 2020, along with Sherilyn Fenn, Paul Rodriguez, Aries Spears and Jeff DuJardin, directed by Vlad Kozlov.