[1] Interested in acting from an early age, he attended the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, but was quickly kicked out.

Two years later, he gained international fame for his performance in Fists in the Pocket, in which he played the epileptic Alessandro, who murders his mother and his brother.

[1] He enjoyed particular success with his starring roles in Damiano Damiani's A Bullet for the General (1967), Salvatore Samperi's Come Play with Me (1968) and Umberto Lenzi's Orgasmo (1969).

He later played Jeff, the temperamental bisexual film director in the German production Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

However, he quickly bounced back and appeared, mostly as a character actor, in various European films, directed by filmmakers such as Wim Wenders and Claude Chabrol.