Gigliola Cinquetti came to international fame in 1964 with she won for Italy the Eurovision Song Contest singing “Non ho l’eta per amarti”. She was born in Verona in 1947. She returned to sing at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton where she sung “Si” and came second. The winners that year were ABBA with “Waterloo”. She currently hosts a current affairs programme on Italian television. She has acted in some films including “Canzoni bulli e pupe” in 1964 and “I cavalieri che fecero limpresa” in 2001.
Cesare Danova was born in 1926 in Bergamo, Italy. He began his acting career in Rome after Word War Two. In 1955 he travelled to the U.S. to make “Don Juan”. Other films he made in Hollywood include “The Man Who Understood Women” with Henry Fonda and Leslie Caron and “Viva Las Vegas” with Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret in 1964. he had his own television series “Garrison’s Gorillas” and guest starred on numberous TV shows such as “Falcon Crest” and “Murder She Wrote”. Cesare Danova died in 1992.
His mini biography on IMDB:
Tall, dark, and handsome, Italian actor Cesare Danova (pronounced Chez-a-ray Da-NO-va) was a true Renaissance man. As a boy, it appeared he might become a professional athlete. But his family wanted him to become a doctor. Cesare, by his own account, studied medicine with such diligence that he suffered a nervous breakdown shortly before he was to take his degree. While recuperating, he was sent by a friend to see Dino De Laurentiis, the famous Italian producer, who was so impressed that he gave Danova a screen test. Thinking it was a joke, Danova insisted on seeing the screen test for himself. Soon, he was cast as the lead in The Captain’s Daughter (1947) (The Captain’s Daughter). Thus began his career as an Italian Errol Flynn. In almost 20 European films, Danova played the dashing lead, riding horses, jumping through windows, dueling, and romancing beauties such as Gina Lollobrigida.
Known for his aristocratic bearing, he often played noblemen. The six-foot-four Danova was also an expert athlete. A devotee of strenuous daily workouts from age 12, Danova was a fencing champion by age 15 and a member of the Italian National Rugby Team by age 17. In addition to playing golf, tennis, and croquet, Danova was an amateur swimming champion, an expert horseman and polo player, and a master archer. He won the Robin Hood Trophy when he shot and embedded one arrow inside another arrow within the target’s bull’s eye. He was also a licensed pilot who flew his own planes (Beechcraft, Piper, Cherokee, and Cessna).
A descendant of famed medieval artist Filippo Lippi, Danova collected antiques and paintings. Describing himself as a fair painter, he taught himself to draw by studying a 75-cent how-to-draw book. Danova owned a library of over 3,000 books, each written in one of the five languages he knew-Italian, English, Spanish, French, and German.
Danova loved the theater and appeared onstage in Rome, Venice, Spain, New York, and Los Angeles. He was in the habit of carrying a small leprechaun good luck charm (and a shamrock ) he’d bought in Ireland, The actor traveled to the Emerald Isle many times. ‘I love Ireland and I go there every chance I get,’ he once said.
With almost 20 European films under his belt, Danova was spotted by MGM’s head of talent in the German-backed ‘Don Giovanni'(1955), his first film shown in the U.S. Impressed, the studio signed Danova to a long-term contract in June of 1956, and he traded his flourishing career in Europe for Hollywood. Rumors abounded that MGM had found its Ben-Hur (a role coveted by Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, among others) for the upcoming super-epic remake by director William Wyler. The studio said it expected big things from Danova but that it was too soon to say whether he’d play the lead until he’d perfected his English. Still, it was no secret that Danova had been brought to America by Wyler to be groomed for the lead role. Hollywood columnist Bob Thomas referred to Danova as the ‘new Italian sensation’ and others compared him to ‘Tyrone Power (I)’ andRobert Taylor, a glamour boy to fill the shoes of Rudolph Valentino.
When Danova arrived, he didn’t speak English and insisted on not learning his lines by rote. He spent the next six months learning the language, a not-terribly-difficult feat for a man with a self-professed love of words who already spoke four languages. With a background in classical acting, and his newfound English fluency, Danova was ready for his big break. But just as filming was to get underway in March, 1957, Wyler decided he didn’t want an actor with an accent playing Ben-Hur (1959) and, instead, chose Charlton Heston (who would win the best actor Oscar for the role). Danova was shocked – the role would almost certainly have made him an international star.
Although Wyler didn’t want Danova, MGM did. The studio said it expected important things from him when they signed him. But now they had no definite alternative plans for him. Danova’s career idled for the next two years. MGM kept him on its payroll, paying him well for doing nothing at all. Danova admitted that, although he was not bitter, the lack of work day after day was enough to drive him crazy. He stayed busy reading, writing, taking diction lessons, building furniture, and playing with his two small sons, Fabrizio and Marco, by English actress Pamela Matthews, whom he had wed in 1955.
Finally, with MGM’s consent, Danova made his American debut in Los Angeles oppositePaul Muni in a musical version of Grand Hotel (1932). When it flopped, he traveled to Cuba to appear in Catch Me If You Can (1959), a film starring Gilbert Roland and Dina Merrill. Financed by soon-to-be-deposed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, it was apparently never released. Danova’s American film debut was as the lover of Leslie Caronin the now-forgotten The Man Who Understood Women (1959), starring Henry Fonda.
When Danova first came to America, he was quoted as saying that he wished to lose his accent so that he would be able to play the role he most wanted, that of an American cowboy. In 1958, he got his wish. He made his American television debut in a first-season episode of The Rifleman (1958) called ‘Duel of Honor,’ the first of three appearances. United Press International summed up Danova’s reversal of fortune this way: “Televiewers will have the opportunity to see the man who almost played the title role in Ben-Hur (1959) – but in place of a chariot he’ll be bouncing around in a stage coach…Danova, a ruggedly handsome Italian import, is making his American debut in ABC-TV’s The Rifleman (1958). It’s quite a comedown from his original intent to star in the most expensive movie in history.”
Cesare Danova got a second chance at stardom when he was cast as Cleopatra’s court advisor, Apollodorus, in the Cleopatra (1963), starring Elizabeth Taylor. As originally scripted, Danova’s character was to be Cleopatra’s lover, servicing her when she wasn’t being romanced by costars Rex Harrison and Richard Burton. “I’m sort of the third man-the real lover,” Danova was quoted as saying.
But then the torrid, real-life love affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burtonbecame a worldwide media sensation. The resulting scandal, since both stars were married but not to each other, generated badly needed public interest in the troubled, bloated, fantastically over-budget production. Le Scandale (as the French dubbed it) upstaged everything about the film not related to Taylor & Burton. As a result, Danova’s performance was now a distraction and most of it was cut, dashing predictions that Danova “should be in big demand after this one.”
In October 1963, not quite two-and-a-half months after Cleopatra’s release, Pamela and Cesare Danova were divorced. The Associated Press headline stated merely: Wife Divorces Cleopatra Slave.
In his early years in America, Danova turned down the opportunity to appear as a series regular on TV for fear of being typecast and locked out of movies altogether. When he finally accepted, it was for the WWII ensemble cast Garrison’s Gorillas (1967), a show patterned somewhat after The Dirty Dozen (1967). Danova said he accepted because he was the first to be cast and his was the best part. He appeared as actor, a con man, expert at disguises and spreading disinformation behind the lines among the Nazis. Although he took pains to distinguish the two roles, Danova’s character was obviously similar to that played by TV contemporary Martin Landau on Mission: Impossible (1966). In any event, Garrison’s Gorillas (1967) did not last beyond the 1967-1968 season.
In time, as movie roles became fewer, Danova did a great deal of television work. Two of his most memorable later screen roles (and the ones for which he is best remembered) were as Mafia Don Giovanni Cappa in Mean Streets (1973), directed by Martin Scorsese, and as corrupt mayor Carmine DePasto in Animal House (1978).
Cesare Danova died of a heart attack on March 19, 1992, shortly after his 66th birthday, during a meeting of the Foreign Language Film committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), at its Los Angeles headquarters.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Tom O’Connor
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Alida Valli was born in Istria, Italy in 1921. At the age of 15 she went to Rome to study acting. She made her film debut in 1936 in “The Three Cornered Hat”. She made films in Italy over the next ten years and was brought to Hollywood to make Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Paradine Case” with Gregory Peck and Ann Todd in 1947. She remainded in Hollywood until she returned to Europe to make the Carol Reed classic “The Third Man” with Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten in 1949. In 1954 Lucino Visconti directed her and Farley Granger in “Senso” where they both gave stunning performances. In 1961 she and Jeanne Moreau were terrific as nuns in “The Carmelites”. Alida Valli made her last film in 2002 and died at the age of 84 in 2006.
Her obituary by John Francis Lane in “The Guardian”:
The Italian film icon from the 1930s onwards, Alida Valli, who has died aged 84, was described by Benito Mussolini as the most beautiful woman in the world after Greta Garbo. He was not her only fan. Most Italian directors of the time were in love with her, and her countrymen and women considered her a national sweetheart. After the war, she found international stardom in Hollywood, though undoubtedly her best English-language role was as Anna Schmidt, Harry Lime’s grieving girlfriend, in The Third Man.
Born Alida von Altenburger in Pula, in what is now Croatia but was then part of the Italian kingdom, Alida moved with her family to Como, in northern Italy, while still a girl. When her father died, she and her mother went to Rome, where she enrolled at the capital’s newly inaugurated film school, Centro Sperimentale. In 1936 she beat four rival students for a small part in I due sergenti (The Two Sergeants), directed by Enrico Guazzoni, who had made the Italian silent film classic, the first Quo Vadis?
Alida was still not particularly ambitious, but was encouraged by the Centro’s teachers, particularly film historian Francesco Pasinetti, who had every right to claim later that he had been her Pygmalion. The name Alida Valli was invented for her, and in 1937 she made five films, winning such popularity that her salary was increased with every picture. Having discovered that she could support her whole family, she decided that the career was worth pursuing.
She became one of the top stars of Italian cinema, appearing mostly in comedies or romantic melodramas. Then, in 1940, she was cast as the heroine in Mario Soldati’s adaptation of Fogazzaro’s 19th-century novel, Piccolo Mondo Antico. She was not Soldati’s first choice, but once on the set she enchanted the director with her beauty and talent. The film was a triumph and Alida won a best actress award. During the second world war, she made many films, including the striking two-part Noi Vivi/Addio Kira! (We the Living), directed by Goffredo Alessandrini, about the hardships of life in post-revolutionary St Petersburg. She and Rossano Brazzi played the tragic young lovers, and the film was acclaimed at the Axis-dominated 1942 Venice film festival, where its anti-communist message was much appreciated.
In 1944, Alida married Oscar De Mejo, a jazz pianist. Their son, Carlo, was born a year later, by which time Alida had been offered a Hollywood contract by David Selznick. There were initial problems over her American visa after an anonymous letter to the US embassy in Rome accused her of fascist sympathies and of having slept with Hitler’s propanganda chief Joseph Goebbels. But Selznick’s lawyers disproved the allegations and the visa was granted, with apologies.
In Hollywood Alida was groomed into a mysterious, vamp-like creature – she was known quite simply as Valli. Her first film there was Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947), in which her icy aloofness gave a mistaken idea of her talents. In 1948 came Miracle of the Bells, in which she co-starred with Frank Sinatra, whom she would later describe as “the greatest (unrequited) passion of my life”. The film was a flop. Then came Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949).
After Alida returned to Europe – without De Mejo, who had discovered a vocation as a painter and stayed on in the US – she made the odd film in France and Italy. Then, in the mid-1950s, her career entered a new phase with roles in auteur films such as Visconti’s Senso (1954), in which she played an Italian countess in love with an Austrian officer (Farley Granger), and Antonioni’s Il Grido (1957), which had won her praise and almost cult status.
This success, however, was clouded by her affair with a friend of her ex-husband’s, Piero Piccioni, the son of a Christian Democrat minister, who had been implicated in the Montesi case, a scandal that rocked Italian society and politics. The case revolved around the death of a young woman, Wilma Montesi, and Alida was called as a witness at Piccioni’s trial, attracting much unfavourable press publicity in the process.
During the next decade Alida struggled to rebuild her career, working mainly abroad. In the early 1960s, she moved to Mexico for three years, married director Giancarlo Zagni and appeared in several films and television plays. Back in Italy her reputation was re-established with such films as Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967), Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Strategem (1970), 1900 (1976) and La Luna (1979).
Her theatrical career took off in 1956, when Zagni directed her in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm and Pirandello’s The Man, the Beast and Virtue. Among her most memorable stage performances were as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the mother in Genet’s Paravents, Deborah in More Stately Mansions, and the Katharine Hepburn role in Suddenly Last Summer. Under the direction of Patrice Chéreau, she played at the Milan Piccolo Teatro in Wedekind’s Lulu. When both in their 80s, Alida and Raf Vallone appeared together as grandparents celebrating their golden wedding in a tragi-comedy TV movie, Vino Santo. The marriage to Zagni ended in 1970.
On the whole, Alida hated talking about the past. A 1995 book, for instance, contained only interviews with journalists, apart from an epilogue of her laconic words on the telephone: “Don’t bother, lasci perdere; it isn’t worth it.” But during the 1990s, when she was making her last stage appearances touring in two Pirandello plays, she played in the Calabrian town where I live. We had dinner after the show, with Carlo, who was also in the company, and she told us that there had not been another man in her life. She was still a very beautiful woman.
She received a life achievement Golden Lion award at the Venice film festival in 1997. Carlo and her second son, Larry, survive her.
· Alida Valli (von Altenburger), actor, born May 31 1921; died April 22 2006 “The Guardian” obituary can also be accessed on-line here.Her IMDB entry:
Enigmatic, dark-haired foreign import Alida Valli was dubbed “The Next Garbo” but didn’t live up to postwar expectations despite her cool, patrician beauty, remote allure and significant talent. Born in Pola, Italy (now Croatia), on May 3, 1921, the daughter of a Tridentine journalist and professor and an Istrian homemaker, she studied dramatics as a teen at the Motion Picture Academy of Rome and Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia before snaring bit roles in such films as Three Cornered Hat (1935) [“The Three-Cornered Hat”] and The Two Sergeants (1936) [“The Two Sergeants”]. She made a name for herself in Italy during WWII playing the title role in Manon Lescaut (1940), won a Venice Film Festival award for Piccolo mondo antico (1941) [“Little Old World”] and was a critical sensation in We the Living (1942) [“We the Living”]. She briefly abandoned her career, however, in 1943, refusing to appear in what she considered fascist propaganda, and was forced into hiding. The next year she married surrealist painter/pianist/composer Oscar De Mejo. They had two children, and one of them, Carlo De Mejo, became an actor. She divorced in 1955, then she came back to Italy,
Following her potent, award-winning work in the title role of Eugenie Grandet (1946), she was discovered and contracted by David O. Selznick to play the murder suspect Maddalena Paradine in Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Paradine Case (1947). She was billed during her Hollywood years simply as “Valli,” and Selznick also gave her top femme female billing in Carol Reed‘s classic film noir The Third Man (1949), but for every successful film–such as the ones previously mentioned–she experienced such failures as The Miracle of the Bells (1948), and audiences stayed away. In 1951 she bid farewell to Hollywood and returned to her beloved Italy. In Europe again, she was sought after by the best directors. Her countess in Luchino Visconti‘s Senso (1954) was widely heralded, and she moved easily from ingénue to vivid character roles. Later standout films encompassed costume dramas as well as shockers and had her playing everything from baronesses to grandmothers in such films as Eyes Without a Face (1960)
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / gr-home@pacbell.net
Viveca Lindfors was born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1920. She became a theatre and film star in her native country before coming to Hollywood in 1946. She starred with Ronald Reagan and Virginia Mayo in “Night unto Night”, with Margaret Sullavan in “No Sad Songs for Me” and wih Charlton Heston and Lizabeth Scott in “Dark City”. By the mid 50’s she was make in Europe making films there. She did return on occasion to the U.S. to make films e.g. in 1965 in “Sylvia” with Carroll Baker and in 1973 in “The Way We Were” with Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand. In 1994 she was back in the U.S. again making “Stargate”. Viveca Lindfors died in her home town in Sweden in 1995 at the age of 74.
Her “Los Angeles Times” obituary:
Viveca Lindfors, the sultry Swedish screen and stage actress who delighted Hollywood and Broadway with her liberated lifestyle as well as her acting and in her later years became known for her one-woman shows, died Wednesday. She was 74.
Miss Lindfors died of complications from rheumatoid arthritis in her native Uppsala, Sweden, her daughter, Lena Tabori of New York City, told The Times on Wednesday.
Tabori said her mother, who lived in Manhattan, had been in Sweden to do her one-woman production, “In Search of Strindberg.” She said Miss Lindfors had regretted being unable to attend the Los Angeles Film Festival for the screening of her most recent film, “Summer in the Hamptons,” which is scheduled for release next month. Miss Lindfors appeared in scores of films, plays and television shows over more than half a century, still turning on the charm as her hair grayed.
When the enduring actress toured her one-woman show “I Am Woman” at age sixtysomething, a Times theater critic wrote: “[She] retains a magical, casually battered and untended beauty. When she smiles, the world lights up. There is strength, but also tenderness in the sculptured, kittenish face. Grit, hauteur and dignity are all part of the svelte persona. This is a woman telling us she’s been through it all and, my dear, she’s still here.” Married and divorced four times, Miss Lindfors often earned attention for her sexual politics and lifestyle as well as for her work. She described her colorful life to critical acclaim in a 1981 autobiography, “Viveka . . . Viveca.” One of the vignettes in the book humorously describes her, at the age of 54, refereeing a squabble between her 5-year-old granddaughter and a 61-year-old suitor concerning who would get to sleep with grandmother that night. “I was wild. I was ahead of my time in feeling sexual liberation,” she candidly told The Times in 1975. “I married my first husband because the gossips said no man would ever want to marry anyone as promiscuous as I was.”
The tall and talented brunette beauty, born Elsa Viveca Torstensdotter Lindfors in Uppsala, trained at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater and appeared in several Swedish films and plays before moving to Hollywood in 1946 under contract to Warner Bros. She made her Hollywood debut in “To the Victor” in 1947.
The actress relocated to New York in 1952 for her Broadway breakthrough role as “Anastasia,” and because of what became her longest marriage (18 years), to playwright-director George Tabori.
Miss Lindfors commuted between the coasts for decades, never equaling the stardom of her Swedish role models Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo, yet always finding producers eager to hire her and audiences willing to enjoy her work. Among her memorable Broadway plays along with “Anastasia” were “Miss Julie” in 1955, “Brecht on Brecht” in 1961, and her later one-woman shows. She won acting honors at the Berlin Film Festival for the feature films “Four in a Jeep” in 1951 and “No Exit” in 1962. Her myriad other films include “No Sad Songs for Me,” “Moonfleet,” “The King of Kings,” “The Way We Were,” “Welcome to L.A.,” “Creepshow” and last year’s “Stargate.” Unlike many beautiful actresses, Miss Lindfors worried little about aging, even when Tabori left her for a much younger woman. “Any qualms I might have had about advancing years were dispelled a long time ago when I decided not to be put down by America’s worship of youth,” she told The Times on her 53rd birthday.
Miss Lindfors is survived by her daughter; two sons, John Tabori of Washington, D.C., and Kristoffer Siegel Tabori of Los Angeles, and four grandchildren. Memorial services will be planned early next year in New York and Sweden, Lena Tabori said.
The above obituary can also be accessed online here.
The Halliday Brand, poster, Viveca Lindfors, 1957. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Journey Into Light, poster, Sterling Hayden, Viveca Lindfors, 1951. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)Digital Camera
Virna Lisi was born in Ancona, Italy in 1936. She made her debut in her home country in “Line of Steel” in 1953. In the mid 60’s she went to Hollywood where she made three films “How to Murder Your Wife” with Jack Lemmon, “Not With My Wife You Don’t” with Tony Curtis and George C. Scott and “Assault on a Queen” with Frank Sinatra. Back in Italy she made “The Secret of Santa Vittoria” with Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani. In 1994 she delivered a stunning performance in “La ReineMargot”. Sadly Virna Lisi died in December 2014.
Her “Telegraph” obituary:
Virna Lisi, the Italian actress, who has died aged 78, enjoyed a brief burst of fame in Hollywood in the 1960s before decamping back to Europe, frustrated at being cast as what she saw as blonde eye-candy; nearly three decades later she won the best actress award at Cannes for her portrayal of the scheming Catherine de Medici in Patrice Chéreau’s costume epic Queen Margot (1994).
She was born Virna Lisa Pieralisi in Ancona on November 8 1936, the daughter of a marble exporter, and began appearing in the Italian cinema at the age of only 17, having been discovered by two Neapolitan producers ; she was soon also working extensively on both stage and television, and her beauty secured her a spot advertising a brand of toothpaste with the slogan: “con quella bocca può dire ciò che vuole” (with that mouth, she can say whatever she wants). She made several films in France, including La Tulipe Noire (Black Tulip, 1964), alongside Alain Delon, and before she was 30 she had come to the attention of Hollywood.
In 1965 she starred with Jack Lemmon and Terry-Thomas in the romantic comedy How to Murder Your Wife. Lemmon has the part of Stanley Ford, a well-off New York cartoonist who is leading a happy-go-lucky bachelor existence until, at a party, he witnesses the comely Virna Lisi bursting out of a large cake in a bikini. The next morning he wakes to find her in bed with him, and discovers that he has married her in a drunken stupor; the relationship goes downhill from there.
Virna Lisi later described the film as “very successful, but very light”, and she was no more complimentary (“trivial fluff”) about Not With My Wife, You Don’t (1966), in which she is an Italian nurse during the Korean War who falls in love with two United States Air Force pilots (Tony Curtis and George C Scott).
As for Assault on a Queen (1966), an action-adventure movie in which she co-starred with Frank Sinatra, in her judgment it was “not very good”.
She then turned down an offer to star in Barbarella (1968), later explaining: “They said, ‘You will look wonderful with wings and long silver hair.’ I said that I wanted to play something, a role, a real part.” The opportunity went to Jane Fonda, but 30 years later Virna Lisi claimed to have no regrets: “Maybe I’ve made some wrong choices in my career, but I don’t think that was one of them.”
Virna Lisi took the bold step of buying out her contract with United Artists and returning to Europe, making an enduring career in both film and television, principally in her native Italy. She did not entirely abandon English-language roles, for example co-starring with Anthony Quinn in Stanley Kramer’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969), in which an Italian wine-producing village conceals from the Germans a million bottles of wine in the aftermath of the fall of Mussolini .
In 1977 Virna Lisi won critical praise for her role as the sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, directed by Liliana Cavani, famous for drawing out superb performances from Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter (1974); and she gained further plaudits for her performance in Luigi Comencini’s Buon Natale… Buon Anno (1989).
Her most successful role could hardly have been further removed from Hollywood’s casting of her as a frivolous blonde. As Catherine de Medici in Queen Margot, set in Reformation France and based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas, she forces her daughter Marguerite de Valois (Isabelle Adjani) to marry the Protestant Henry of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil) and helps to orchestrate the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Protestants in 1572.
Although not everyone was enamoured of the film – The New York Times called it “chaotic, overheated and bizarrely anachronistic”, and likened Virna Lisi’s character to “Nosferatu with a wig” – the judges at Cannes voted her the year’s best actress. “I heard Clint Eastwood announce my name on the stage,” she later recalled. “It was a shock. My God! This was just a small part. My son, who was sitting next to me, whispered and told me not to cry. I got up there and cried as if I were a little starlet. It was very stupid, but, then, it had taken me 35 years to get there.”
It was a source of pride to her that her looks had nothing to do with the accolade: “It must have been difficult for [the film makers] to find anyone who was willing to look as ugly as this woman. I spent three hours in make-up every morning with them pinning things in my hair, to make me look ugly.” Peeling off the make-up and hair required another hour at the end of the day’s filming.
Virna Lisi’s later films include Follow Your Heart (1996), in which he plays an elderly woman dying of cancer. Her performance was rewarded with an Italian Golden Globe for best actress.
In 2002 she made Il più bel giorno della mia vita (The Best Day of My Life), appearing as a widowed grandmother living in her family’s crumbling villa in Rome.
Virna Lisi married, in 1960, Franco Pesci, an architect. He died in 2013, and she is survived by their son.
Virna Lisi, born November 8 1936, died December 18 2014
ARABELLA, US poster art, Virna Lisi, bottom from left: Terry-Thomas, James Fox, Virna Lisi, Terry-Thomas, Margaret Rutherford, 1967 ACHTUNG AUFNAHMEDATUM GESCHÄTZT PUBLICATIONxINxGERxSUIxAUTxONLY Copyright: xCourtesyxEverettxCollectionx MSDARAB EC006
Gina Lollobrigida was born in 1927 and is an Italian actress, photojournalist and sculptor. She was one of the highest profile European actresses of the 1950s and early 1960s, a period in which she was an international sex symbol.
As her film career slowed, she established second careers as a photojournalist and sculptor. In the 1970s, she achieved a scoop by gaining access to Fidel Castro for an exclusive interview.
She has continued as an active supporter of Italian and Italian American causes, particularly the National Italian American Foundation (NIAF). In 2008, she received the NIAF Lifetime Achievement Award at the Foundation’s Anniversary Gala. In 2013, she sold her jewelry collection, and donated the nearly $5 million from the sale to benefit stem cell therapy research.
Born Luigina Lollobrigida in Subiaco, Italy, she is one of four daughters of a furniture manufacturer and his wife. Her sisters are Giuliana (born 1924), Maria (born 1929) and Fernanda (1930–2011). In her youth, Lollobrigida did some modelling and participated successfully in several beauty contests. At around this time, she began appearing in Italian films in minor roles.
In 1947, Lollobrigida entered the Miss Italiapageant and came in third place, giving her national exposure.
In 1950, Howard Hughes signed Lollobrigida on a preliminary seven-year contract to make three pictures a year. She refused the final terms of the contract, preferring to remain in Europe and Hughes suspended her. Despite selling RKO Pictures in 1955, Hughes retained Lollobrigida’s contract. The dispute prevented her from working in American movies filmed in the US until 1959, though not from working in American productions shot in Europe, although Hughes often threatened legal action against the producers.
By the 1970s, her film career had slowed down. She appeared in King, Queen, Knave, co-starring with David Niven, and in a few other poorly received productions in the early part of the decade. In 1973, she was a member of the jury at the 8th Moscow International Film Festival.
In the mid-1980s, she starred in the television series Falcon Crest as Francesca Gioberti, a role originally written for Sophia Loren, who had turned it down. For that role she received a third Golden Globe nomination. She also had a supporting role in the 1985 television miniseries Deceptions, co-starring with Stefanie Powers. The following year she appeared as guest star in the TV series The Love Boat.
In 1949, Lollobrigida married a Slovenian physician, Milko Škofič. They had one child, Andrea Milko. (Milko Škofič, Jr.), born on 28 July 1957. He gave up the practice of medicine to become her manager. In 1960, Lollobrigida moved from her native Italy to Toronto, Canada, with Škofič and their child.They divorced in 1971.
In October 2006, at age 79, she announced to Spain’s ¡Hola! magazine her engagement to a 45-year-old Spanish businessman, Javier Rigau y Rafols. They had met at a party in Monte Carlo in 1984 and had since become companions. The engagement was called off on 6 December 2006, reportedly because of the strain of intense media interest.
In 2013, Lollobrigida sold her jewelry collection through Sotheby’s. She donated nearly $5 million to benefit stem cell therapy.
May Britt was born in 1933 in Sweden. She began her career in the 1950’s in Italian films. In 1956 she had a featured role as the friend of Audrey Hepburn’s Natasha in “War and Peace”. She moved to Hollywood when she obtained a contract with 20th Century Fox. Among her films were “The Young Lions” with Marlon Brando, “The Hunters” with Robert Mitchum and “The Blue Angel” with Curt Jurgens. She retired from acting on her marriage to Sammy Davis Jnr.
After their divorce she resumed her career for a very short time.
Her last appearance been in 1988. She resides in California and has become a talented painter.
Her IMDB entry:
She was only 18 years old and working as a photographer’s assistant in Stockholm when two Italians showed up. Producer Carlo Ponti and director Mario Soldati were there to see pictures of beautiful models, searching for a blonde girl for a movie.
They picked her instead and soon she found herself in Rome.
She quickly made a number of movies, almost all of them forgotten, where all she had to do was look beautiful.
She was offered a contract with 20th Century Fox and came to Hollywood, where her part in The Blue Angel (1959) got pretty good reviews.
But she got tired of always playing the femme fatale and after marrying Sammy Davis Jr.she left the movies to take care of her children instead.
Senta Berger was born in 1941 in Vienna. In 1958 she joined the Josefstadt Theatre in Vienna.
She had a small part in “The Journey” with Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr. She travelled to Hollywood in 1962 and made several films there including “Major Dundee” with Charlton Heston and Richard Harris and “The Glory Guys” with Tom Tryon. By the late sixties she was back in Europe where she made several films over the years and has also acted frequently on the stage.
Senta Berger was born in 1941 in Vienna, Austria to her father Josef Berger who was a musician and her mother Therese Berger, a school teacher. Senta and her father performed together when she was just four years old. She sang and her dad played the piano.
At five years old, she took ballet lessons and at 14, Berger turned to acting taking private lessons. She left her private school education at 16. 1957 Berger was discovered by famous director Willi Forst and played a small role in a film. She was accepted to the Max Reinhardt Seminar.
1958 Berger was the youngest member at the Vienna Theater in Josefstadt. Director Bernhard Wicki and producer Artur Brauner sought after Senta producing the film The Good Soldier, by Heinz Rühmann. It succeeded and Brauner used her in several films.
1962 Berger moved to Hollywood and starred with Charlton Heston, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Richard Harris, George Hamilton, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne and Yul Brynner. In 1969 she returned to Europe and was seen during the 1970’s in Italian productions of various genres.
In 1967, she returned to the silver screen with an Alain Delon film. 1968 Berger played in the three-part thriller Babeck by Herbert Reinecker. 1970 was her debut as Producer of her own company.
As director she put her husband’s film before the camera. Further, international successful of films of her production company have included The White Rose, The Nasty Girl and Mother Courage.
In addition, Berger expanded her European career in France and Italy. The birth of her two sons, Simon (* 1972) and Luca (b. 1979) prompted Berger to turn back to the theater.
1985/86 she managed her TV comeback in front of the German-speaking audience in the television series Kir Royal co-starring with Franz Xaver Kroetz , Dieter Hildebrandt and Billie Zöckler. Many TV series guest appearances followed.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Geoff Bridgedale
Her IMDB mini biography can also be accessed online here.
Renato Salvatori was born in 1934 in Italy. He worked with the great Italian directors including Visconti, Rossellini and De Sica. While making “Rocco and his Brothers” in 1962 he met the French actress Annie Girardot whom he married.He died in 1988 at the age of 54. His MDB page can be accessed here.
She won acting honors at the Berlin Film Festival for the feature films “Four in a Jeep” in 1951 and “No Exit” in 1962. Her myriad other films include “No Sad Songs for Me,” “Moonfleet,” “The King of Kings,” “The Way We Were,” “Welcome to L.A.,” “Creepshow” and last year’s “Stargate.” Unlike many beautiful actresses, Miss Lindfors worried little about aging, even when Tabori left her for a much younger woman. “Any qualms I might have had about advancing years were dispelled a long time ago when I decided not to be put down by America’s worship of youth,” she told The Times on her 53rd birthday.
