Renato Casaro -- arguably the greatest film-poster artist of all time -- died today. Perhaps more than anyone else he established what people expect film posters to be, handpainting the original of each one in a dashing style. You have certainly seen some of his posters; some of his more famous ones were for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars, Conan the Barbarian, Dune, Total Recall, Terminator 2, True Lies, La Femme Nikita, The Princess Bride, The NeverEnding Story, and Dances with Wolves. (You may notice that there are a fair number of Arnold Scharzenegger films; Casaro once said that he was the perfect actor to paint.) But, of course, he was a major influence on many other film poster artists. Film poster art is a bit of niche aristic genre, but Casaro put an immense amount of genius into it, and it always showed.
