Peppino Mazzullo, Voice of Topo Gigio, the Italian Puppet on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ Dies at 100

Peppino Mazzullo, the Italian actor who provided the voice for the mouse puppet Topo Gigio, best known for his frequent, funny appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, died Wednesday. He was 100.

Mazzullo died at his home in Santo Stefano di Briga, Italy, a village not far from his birthplace of Messina, the newspaper Il Messaggero reported.

Topo Gigio, 10 inches tall and created by Milan native Maria Perego, debuted on CBS’ The Ed Sullivan Show on Dec. 9, 1962, and he came back often through the legendary program’s conclusion on June 6, 1971.

Mazzullo and Topo Gigio got the famously stiff host to lighten up during their chats, exposing a different side of Sullivan to viewers, and the big-eared mouse closed each of his appearances with the line, “Eddie, kiss me goodnight.”

While Mazzullo did the voice, Perego controlled Topo Gigio’s legs with her fingers on one hand and opened and closed his mouth using rods with the other. Meanwhile, two other puppeteers operated his arms.

“When he’s on my arm, I actually feel that he’s a living thing and that I’m talking to somebody,” Sullivan said. “I’ve never had that feeling before with any puppet or dummy.”

Joan Rivers created sketches for Topo Gigio in what was her first paying job as a writer.

“I lay on the floor and wrote a sketch about this comic Italian puppet mouse, with a little Italian accent, who had become a semi-fad in America,” she once said. “I had him asking Ed Sullivan to explain football. I put Topo in a little football jersey that said ¼ on the back. Topo Gigio paid my car payments for six months. God bless that little lousy mouse.”

Born on June 6, 1926, Giuseppe Mazzullo started acting as a youngster in Santo Stefano, then attended the Academy of Cinematographic Art in Rome and the Academy of Dramatic Art in Milan.

He worked on radio shows as a member of the RAI drama troupe amid other acting assignments before he got a chance to voice Topo Gigio for the first time.

As he explained it, when he was 2, he “suddenly woke up and at the foot of my bed and saw a little figure moving. I got scared, I shouted ‘Mom!, but my voice wouldn’t come out. After a while, this ‘figure’ disappeared. My voice came back, my mom arrived, I told her what I had seen, and she reassured me: ‘Don’t worry, it’s a fuddittu, a little sprite, it will bring you luck.

“One day, Maria Perego and her husband, Federico Caldura, thought of a musical number with different characters. One of them looked just like that fuddittu. I got a shiver, it was also a pretty ugly puppet, but I picked it up, I liked it after all. Caldura suggested to me, ‘Try to give it a voice, who knows, maybe a nice character will come out of it.’ And immediately I got Topo Gigio’s voice.”

Before he knew it, he was playing the miniature hero in the 1961 adventure film The Magic World of Topo Gigio.

Mazzullo voiced the puppet through 2006. After retiring from performing, he founded the Piccolissimo Teatro di Messina, where he also taught acting.

His funeral is set for Thursday in the church of San Giovanni Battista in Santo Stefano di Briga.