Italian movie legend Gina Lollobrigida, who obtained intercontinental stardom throughout the 1950s and was dubbed “the most beautiful lady in the world” just after the title of a person her films, died in Rome on Monday, her agent stated. She was 95.
The agent, Paola Comin, didn’t give aspects. But Lollobrigida experienced surgical procedure in September to fix a thigh bone damaged in a drop. She returned property and said she had speedily resumed walking.
A drawn portrait of the diva graced a 1954 include of Time journal, which likened her to a “goddess” in an report about Italian movie-building. Additional than a 50 %-century afterwards, Lollobrigida still turned heads with her brown, curly hair and statuesque determine, and chosen to be termed an actress as a substitute of a the gender-neutral expression actor.
“Lollo,” as she was lovingly nicknamed by Italians, commenced earning movies in Italy just soon after the close of Globe War II, as the region began to advertise on the major screen a stereotypical principle of Mediterranean attractiveness as buxom and brunette.
Besides “The World’s Most Wonderful Woman” in 1955, job highlights bundled Golden Globe-winner “Come September,” with Rock Hudson “Trapeze” “Beat the Devil,” a 1953 John Huston film starring Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones and “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell,” which gained Lollobrigida Italy’s prime film award, a David di Donatello, as greatest actress in 1969.
In Italy, she worked with some of the country’s best directors following the war, such as Mario Monicelli, Luigi Comencini, Pietro Germi and Vittorio De Sica.
Two of her more well-known films at dwelling had been Comencini’s “Pane Amore e Fantasia” (“Bread, Like and Dreams”Fantasy) in 1953, and the sequel a yr later on, “Pane Amore e Gelosia” (“Bread, Appreciate and Jealousy”). Her male foil was Vittorio Gassman, 1 of Italy’s top men on the display.
Lollobrigida also was an completed sculptor, painter and photographer, and eventually basically dropped film for the fantastic arts. With her digicam, she roamed the environment from what was then the Soviet Union to Australia. In 1974, Fidel Castro hosted her as a visitor in Cuba for 12 days as she labored on a photo reportage.
Lollobrigida was born on July 4, 1927 in Subiaco, a picturesque hill town around Rome, where by her father was a furnishings maker. Lollobrigida commenced her vocation in elegance contests, posing for the covers of journals and transient appearances in insignificant movies. Producer Mario Costa plucked her from the streets of Rome to seem on the large monitor.
Eccentric mogul Howard Hughes eventually brought Lollobrigida to the United States, exactly where she performed with some of Hollywood’s top adult men of the 1950s and 60s, together with Frank Sinatra, Sean Connery, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Yul Brynner.
Over the several years, her co-stars also incorporated Europe’s most dashing male stars of the period, amid them Louis Jourdan, Fernando Rey, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Alec Guinness.
Even though Lollobrigida performed some remarkable roles, her intercourse image graphic outlined her job, and her most popular people were in lighthearted comedies these types of as the “Bread, Love” trilogy.
With lush eyelashes and thick, brown curls framing her encounter, Lollobrigida started off a hairstyle rage in the 1950s recognised as the “poodle reduce.” Gossip columnists commented on alleged rivalries between her and Sophia Loren, one more Italian movie star celebrated for her physical magnificence,
In center age, Lollobrigida’s romance with a guy 34 several years her junior, Javier Rigau, from Barcelona, Spain, kept gossip pages buzzing for several years.
“I have normally had a weak point for more youthful adult males because they are generous and have no complexes,” the actress advised Spain’s “Hola” magazine. Following much more than 20 years of dating, in 2006, the then-79-12 months-previous Lollabrigida introduced that she would Rigau, but the marriage by no means transpired.
Her 1st marriage, to Milko Skofic, a Yugoslavia-born health practitioner, ended in divorce in 1971.
In the past many years of her lifestyle, Lollobrigida’s title far more routinely appeared in articles by journalists masking Rome’s courts, not the glamour scene, as authorized battles had been waged about no matter if she had the mental competence to are inclined to her funds.
On her internet site, Lollobrigida recalled how her spouse and children missing its house all through the bombings of Earth War II and went to stay in Rome. She studied sculpture and portray at a high school dedicated to the arts, whilst her two sisters worked as movie threater ushers to enable her to keep on her scientific tests.
