George Eastman (actor)


George Eastman is an Italian B-movie actor and screenwriter well known for his frequent collaborations with notorious director Joe D'Amato. He is most famous for his role as the insane, cannibalistic serial killer Klaus Wortmann in the gory 1980 horror film Antropophagus. He also played a similar role in its 1981 follow-up, Absurd. Both films were directed by D'Amato and written by Eastman.

Career

Eastman was born in 1942 in Genoa, Italy and studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome and at the Drama School held of Alessandro Fersen. He took his Americanized alias "George Eastman" when he was cast as a "heavy" in many spaghetti westerns made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1972 he played the villain in The Call of the Wild which starred Charlton Heston and was directed by Ken Annakin.
Eastman later became a regular performer in many movies directed by Joe D'Amato, for whom he also wrote many screenplays. Their first work together was Cormack of the Mounties in 1975.
He was a very familiar face in Italian B-cinema in the early 1980s, being generally cast as a villain, thanks to his towering height and his dark and menacing looks. He co-starred in many Italian futuristic sci-fi films such as Bronx Warriors, The New Barbarians, Endgame, Ironmaster, 2020 Texas Gladiators and After the Fall of New York. His most famous movie is the gory horror film Anthropophagous, directed by Joe D'Amato in 1980, in which he played the monster. He also starred in D'Amato's Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, Porno Holocaust and Absurd.
Two of his greatest major villain roles were in Rabid Dogs and Blastfighter. He appeared in Paramount's 1985 biblical film King David playing Goliath in David's childhood flashback scene. In 1986, he performed as Stefano in the movie Regalo di Natale, directed by Pupi Avati. He also wrote and directed the sci-fi film Metamorphosis/ DNA Formula Lethal in 1990, after which he quit acting to concentrate on his screenwriting. He is now a well regarded author in Italian television and only acts occasionally.

Partial filmography