Peppino Mazzullo, the Voice of Topo Gigio for 45 Years, Dies at 100
Peppino Mazzullo, the Italian actor who gave Topo Gigio his voice from 1961 to 2006, died on Wednesday morning at his home in Santo Stefano di Briga, the village near Messina where he was born. He turned 100 in June. For 45 years he was the shy little mouse that charmed Italian television, Ed Sullivan’s American audience and generations of children around the world.
The news came from the mayor of Messina, Federico Basile. “Messina says goodbye to one of its illustrious sons, a great artist and a person who leaves a human and cultural legacy that will last,” he wrote. He ended his message with three words: “Safe travels, Maestro.”
Mazzullo’s funeral is set for Thursday, October 1, at 3:30 PM in the church of San Giovanni Battista in Santo Stefano di Briga. Univision, citing TV Azteca, reports that people close to him said he died “peacefully of natural causes at his home.”
A badly made puppet and a voice that stuck
Topo Gigio was created by Maria Perego with Federico Caldura and first appeared on Italian television in 1959. His first voice belonged to the singer Domenico Modugno. Two years later the job passed to Mazzullo, a young stage actor from Sicily, and it stayed with him for almost half a century.
Image: Radiocorriere, 1962, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
He met the mouse in a Rai studio. Years later he described the moment to L’HuffPost: “When I saw it, my heart skipped a beat. I already knew it, but I couldn’t tell anyone. It was a badly made puppet, the glue wouldn’t hold and it had a sour face, but I liked it. I took it in my hand and started to make it talk.” “Gino Bramieri, who was there, insisted I shouldn’t forget that voice, because, according to him, it would make me famous. And so it did.”
That “I already knew it” was no figure of speech. Mazzullo liked to tell a story from when he was about two years old: he woke to see a tiny creature at the foot of his bed, tried to call his mother and found his voice had gone. She told him it was a fuddettu, a Sicilian sprite that would bring him luck. When he walked into the Rai studio decades later, he said, he recognised it.
He never called himself a dubber
Italian outlets call Mazzullo the historic doppiatore, the dubbing actor, of Topo Gigio. He didn’t like the word. “I am the creator and the performer of my voice. I never dubbed anyone else. A dubbing actor gives voice to an absent character; I, on the other hand, invented it,” he told La Repubblica, as El Financiero reported this week.
Il Giornale d’Italia writes that his contribution went beyond voicing the lines: he helped write the scripts and improvised jokes during recordings. The catchphrase every Italian knows, “Ma cosa mi dici mai?” (roughly, “Whatever are you telling me?”), was his. Topo Gigio said it whenever someone paid him a compliment, often hiding his snout behind his hands.
On screen, the mouse was a small piece of stagecraft. The page Sofa Entertainment keeps for The Ed Sullivan Show, quoted by Quotidiano Nazionale, describes a puppet about 25 centimetres tall. Perego worked the legs and mouth with control rods, two more puppeteers moved the arms, and Mazzullo supplied the voice, all of them dressed in black against black drapes so the audience saw only the mouse.
Image: Arquivo Nacional (Brazil), Correio da Manhã collection, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
From Carosello to Ed Sullivan
Il Post notes that Topo Gigio was the first animated puppet on Carosello, the evening block of short adverts that Italian families watched together, appearing in 1961 in a spot for Pavesini biscuits. Films and variety shows followed, alongside Raffaella Carrà, Pippo Baudo and Cino Tortorella, and the mouse appeared on Canzonissima.
Image: Canzonissima 1974, Rai, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
VoiceEditSuiteTrim it, clean it, deliver it. One pass.In the United States he appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan once said that with the mouse on his arm he truly felt he was talking to a living being, a feeling no other puppet had given him, according to the same Sofa Entertainment page.
In the 1960s Mazzullo also played Richetto, the unruly schoolboy beside the wizard Mago Zurlì on the Zecchino d’Oro, Italy’s children’s song festival.
When the character moved on without him
The partnership ended in the 2000s. According to Il Post, Perego signed a contract with Mediaset and the voice actor was replaced as a result. Leo Valli has been the official voice of Topo Gigio since 2010.
For working voice actors, this is the part worth sitting with. Mazzullo built the character’s sound, wrote some of its lines and coined its catchphrase, yet the character belonged to its creators, and when the business changed, the voice changed too. The mouse kept working: in 2025 he sang a duet with Lucio Corsi at Sanremo and found a younger audience.
The two voices met in June. Valli was at the party in Santo Stefano di Briga when Mazzullo turned 100, Il Mattino reports. El Financiero writes that the whole village came out to the square, there was a cake shaped like the number 100, and after a screening in the church Mazzullo voiced Topo Gigio in public one last time.
He also spoke to the crowd. MessinaToday recorded a farewell that now reads almost like a prophecy: “I live to be useful to others, but it is a world that no longer belongs to me.”
A life on the stage, and back home
Mazzullo began acting as a boy in the small theatre of his village, reciting monologues. In his early twenties he won a scholarship to the Academy of Cinematographic Art in Rome and then studied at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Milan. He worked for decades in theatre, radio and television, including Rai’s drama company.
In 2004 he went home to Santo Stefano di Briga and founded the Piccolissimo Teatro di Messina, where he ran a school of comic and dramatic theatre. In 2008 he won the Leggio d’Oro, Italy’s award for voice work, in its cartoon voice category.
His death comes months after that of Gabriel Garzón, who voiced Topo Gigio for Mexico and Latin America. El Financiero reports that Garzón died in January, aged 57.
Photo: Eugenio Hansen, OFS, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In one of his last interviews, Il Mattino and Leggo report, Mazzullo said that what the mouse stood for above all was “the joy of living.” Basile put it another way: with his voice, he wrote, Mazzullo had “written an important page of Italian culture and imagination.”
Sources: Il Post; Il Mattino; Leggo; Sky TG24; Quotidiano Nazionale; Il Giornale d’Italia; MessinaToday; Virgilio Notizie; El Financiero; Univision. Quotations from Italian and Spanish sources are translated by Voice Over Herald. Hero image: Radiocorriere, 1961, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Topo Gigio toy photo: Eugenio Hansen, OFS, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Lee este artículo en español: Muere a los 100 años Peppino Mazzullo, la voz de Topo Gigio durante 45 años
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