Sebastião Bernardes de Souza Prata
The life of Brazilian actor-comedian Sebastião Bernardes de Souza Prata will be the subject of an upcoming documentary.
Orphaned as a child, he took the stage name Grande Otelo. He launched his film career with the movie Noites Cariocas in 1935 and was the comedic partner of Oscarito.
He was chosen by Orson Welles to co-star in the ill-fated 1943 documentary It’s All True.
Grande Otelo also worked with such filmmakers as Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade and Werner Herzog.
The documentary, helmed by Lucas H. Rossi, will be shot in 2018 and produced by Globo Filmes and Canal Brasil, according to AdoroCinema.
It will utilize interviews, archival footage and commentaries by such colleagues as Paulo José and Zezé Motta.
The actor-comediancdied in France in 1993 at the age of 78.
Grande Otelo participated in the television documentary Hollywood the Golden Years: The RKO Story, the short A Linguagem de Orson Welles and the 1993 film It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles.
The DVD of It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles and the book It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey are available at Amazon.com and other online retailers.
RKO Pictures scrapped It’s All True before it completion. Years later, Welles would describe the South American project as cursed, though he struggled at great personal cost to persuade other movie studios to finance the completion of the project.
For more information on the making of It’s All True, visit the Welles collections at Lilly Library at Indiana University and the University of Michigan Special Collection.
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