Peppino Mazzullo dies at 100: Beloved Topo Gigio voice
Peppino Mazzullo, the Italian actor who gave Topo Gigio his voice during the mouse puppet’s many visits to “The Ed Sullivan Show,” died Wednesday, Sept. 30, at his home in Santo Stefano di Briga, Italy. He was 100. The village sits near Messina, Sicily, where Mazzullo was born, according to the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter.
Peppino Mazzullo and Topo Gigio on ‘Ed Sullivan’
Created by Milan-born puppeteer Maria Perego, the 10-inch Topo Gigio first appeared on CBS’ “The Ed Sullivan Show” on Dec. 9, 1962. The big-eared mouse kept coming back until the variety series ended its run on June 6, 1971.
The act took several people. Peppino Mazzullo supplied the voice, Perego worked the legs with one hand and the mouth with rods in the other, and two more puppeteers handled the arms, THR reported. On air, the mouse coaxed a looser, warmer side out of the famously stiff Sullivan and signed off every visit with “Eddie, kiss me goodnight.”
Sullivan once described how real the puppet felt to him: “When he’s on my arm, I actually feel that he’s a living thing and that I’m talking to somebody. I’ve never had that feeling before with any puppet or dummy.”
Topo Gigio also gave Joan Rivers her first paid writing job. “Topo Gigio paid my car payments for six months. God bless that little lousy mouse,” Rivers once said of the sketches she wrote for the character.
How Peppino Mazzullo found the voice
Born Giuseppe Mazzullo on June 6, 1926, he started acting as a child in Santo Stefano and later trained at the Academy of Cinematographic Art in Rome and the Academy of Dramatic Art in Milan. He performed on radio with the RAI drama company before Perego and her husband, Federico Caldura, handed him a new puppet and asked him to give it a voice.
Mazzullo said the puppet reminded him of a childhood memory: At age 2, he saw a small figure at the foot of his bed, and his mother told him it was a “fuddittu,” a little sprite that would bring him luck. “And immediately I got Topo Gigio’s voice,” he recalled, according to THR.
He played the character in the 1961 film “The Magic World of Topo Gigio” and kept voicing the mouse through 2006. After retiring from performing, he founded the Piccolissimo Teatro di Messina, where he also taught acting. Italian news agency AGI marked his 100th birthday in June.
Funeral
Mazzullo’s funeral was set for Thursday, Oct. 1, at the church of San Giovanni Battista in Santo Stefano di Briga, THR reported. For more tributes to entertainment figures, read about James Bond editor John Grover and voice actor Tom Kane.
Reporting from The Hollywood Reporter and AGI contributed to this story.