On the occasion of the centenary of his birth, Italian culture remembers, after a long and unjust oblivion, Walter Michele Armando Annichiarico aka WalterChiari.
Veronese by birth (8 March 1924), Apulian by origins, Milanese by adoption, without roots with his cosmopolitan artistic nature, he remains unique and indefinable in his career as an actor.
He made 112 films, but Italian cinema never truly adopted him despite his debut in 1946 ("Vanity" by Giorgio Pastina), the call from Luchino Visconti ("Bellissima", 1951) and his personal success with Blasetti ("Io ,I, I and... the others", 1966).
In the theater he was a star of musical comedy and revue theater (his successes were incredible in "Buonanotte Bettina", "The Owl and the Kitty", "A Mandarin for Teo" between the 1950s and 1960s), but also a charismatic actor of prose (from "The Odd Couple" with Renato Rascel in 1966 to "Endgame" by Beckett twenty years later).
He owes his success above all to the TV of which he became a regular protagonist since 1958 when he appeared together with Carlo Campanini with his warhorse, "Il Sarchiapone".
From then on and for over 10 years he was a brilliant experimental showman between "Studio Uno", "Canzonissima" with Mina and Paolo Panelli, up to "Speciale per voi".
Precisely in that studio, in 1970, he was caught by the police on charges of drug possession and dealing, and remained in prison for 98 days until he was acquitted of the dispatch charge and received a suspended sentence for drug use.
Years later he openly admitted that he had used cocaine.
For ten years Rai closed all its doors to him, while public opinion did not seem to forgive him for living outside the rules.
When things seemed to be going the right way again, in 1985, once again a repentant - the same one who accused Enzo Tortora - sent him back before the judges, accusing him once again of trading cocaine.
Already acquitted during the investigation, Walter Chiari was nevertheless destroyed by that affair and from then on began a decline which ended, on the night of 19 December 1991, with a heart attack.
He was found lifeless the next morning in his residence in Milan.
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