The Alien Who Phoned Home, Carlo Rambaldi Gets a Posthumous Star on Vine Street

Hollywood will give an alien a place on its sidewalk on Thursday. At 11:30 a.m. on October 15, the Walk of Fame dedicates its 2,860th star to Carlo Rambaldi, the Italian special effects artist who built the creature at the center of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The star goes in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theatre at 1611 Vine Street in the Motion Pictures category, according to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and the ceremony will stream live at walkoffame.com.

The honor is posthumous. Rambaldi died on August 10, 2012, in Lamezia Terme, Italy, at the age of 86. His daughter Daniela Rambaldi will accept the star. Entertainment journalist Silvia Bizio will emcee, and the speakers are Antonio Saccone, president of Cinecittà, the actor Matt Winston, and Cristina Lippolis Rambaldi, the honoree’s granddaughter, whom the Chamber lists as president of the Rambaldi Foundation.

Italian institutions pushed for the star. Corriere di Bologna reported that the nomination came from Cinecittà and the Italian Ministry of Culture and was backed by the committee formed for the celebrations of Rambaldi’s centenary, and that he was named to the Class of 2026 alongside another Italian, Franco Nero. The paper added that on October 14, the eve of the ceremony, the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles will open Dreaming the Cosmos, an exhibition of his paintings, sculptures and career materials, including his three Oscar statuettes and an animatronic E.T. head made for his centenary.

“Carlo was a visionary whose artistry brought cinema’s most unforgettable characters to life,” said Ana Martinez, the Walk of Fame’s producer.

From Clay Toys to King Kong

Rambaldi was born on September 15, 1925, in Vigarano Mainarda, a small town in Italy. As a boy he built toys out of clay and helped his father in a workshop, where he learned about mechanics and levers, the Chamber’s biography says. His family opposed an artistic career, but he enrolled as a scenography student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. He began as a sculptor and painter and found his calling in character animation, designing small mechanisms to see whether he could animate them electrically.

In the 1950s he moved into special effects and worked on more than sixty Italian films, collaborating with Federico Fellini, Ettore Scola, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dario Argento, Mario Bava and Pupi Avati. Hollywood noticed in the 1970s, when producer Dino De Laurentiis called him to work on King Kong. Rambaldi designed and built the life-sized animatronic gorilla and won his first Special Achievement Academy Award for it.

The credits that followed read like a map of modern genre film. They include Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Ridley Scott’s Alien and David Lynch’s Dune, along with the monster Dagoth in Conan the Destroyer and the mechanized werewolf of Silver Bullet. His most memorable creation was the alien of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which became a pop culture phenomenon. In all, the Chamber says, he won three Academy Awards for visual effects.

The Foundation and the Future

Rambaldi’s family founded the Fondazione Culturale Carlo Rambaldi to promote the art and culture of special effects and to support young artists and filmmakers. It runs a scholarship, school projects that include “E.T. Save the Planet,” and a project called Alien Perspective, which uses virtual and extended reality to let audiences step inside his imagination. The aim, the Chamber says, is to bridge craftsmanship and technology.

The 2,860th star comes right after Air Supply’s, the 2,859th, which was scheduled for October 8. For anyone who cannot get to Vine Street on Thursday morning, the dedication will be broadcast on the Walk of Fame’s website.