European Actors Archives - Page 25 of 28

Karlheinz Boehm

Sissi, The Young Empress Sissi, Die junge Kaiserin Year: 1956 – Austria Romy Schneider, Karlheinz Bohm Director: Ernst Marischka Poster, France. It is forbidden to reproduce the photograph out of context of the promotion of the film. It must be credited to the Film Company and/or the photographer assigned by or authorized by/allowed on the set by the Film Company. Restricted to Editorial Use. Photo12 does not grant publicity rights of the persons represented.

Karlheinz Boehm was born in 1928 in Darmstadt in Germany. He is the son of the famous conductor Karl Boehm. He palyed the Emperor Franz Josef opposite Romy Schneider in the three “Sissi” films in the 1950’s. He went on to make “Peeping Tom” for the famous British director Michael Powell in 1960. It was harshly reviewed when it first was released but is now regarded as a classic of repressed violence. He made “Come Fly With Me” with Dolores Hart in 1963. In his later years he has been very active in international charity work. He died in 2014.

His Wikipedia entry:
Karlheinz Böhm (born 16 March 1928 in Darmstadt), sometimes referred to as Carl Boehm or Karl Boehm, is an Austrian actor and the only child of soprano Thea Linhard and conductor Karl Böhm. Böhm took part in 45 films and became famous in Germany for his role as Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria in the Sissi trilogy and internationally for his role as Mark, the psychopathic protagonist of Peeping Tom, directed by Michael Powell. He is the founder of the trust Menschen für Menschen (“Humans for Humans”), which helps people in need in Ethiopia. He also received the Ethiopian honorary citizenship in 2003.

Having two citizenships, he sees himself as a world citizen: His father was born in Graz, his mother in Munich and today he lives in Grödig near Salzburg. He spent his youth inDarmstadt, Hamburg and Dresden. In Hamburg he attended elementary school and the Kepler-Gymnasium (a grammar school). A faked medical certificate^{[citation needed]} enabled him to emigrate to Switzerland in 1939, where he attended the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz, a boarding school. In 1946, he moved to Graz with his parents, where he graduated from high school the same year. He originally intended to become a pianist but received poor feedback when he auditioned. His father urged him to study English and German language and literary studies, followed by studies of history of arts for one semester in Rome after which he quit and returned to Vienna to take acting lessons with Prof. Helmut Krauss. From 1948 to 1976 he worked as a successful actor in about 45 films and also in theatre. With Romy Schneider, he starred in the Sissi trilogy as the Emperor Franz Joseph which limited him to one specific genre as an actor.

He made three notable U.S. films in 1962. He played Jakob Grimm in the 1962 MGM–Cinerama spectacular The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and Ludwig van Beethoven in the Walt Disney film The Magnificent Rebel. (The latter film was made especially for the Disney anthology television series, but was released theatrically in Europe.) He appeared in a villainous role as the Nazi-sympathizing son of Paul Lukas in the MGM film Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a Technicolor, widescreen remake of the 1921 silent Rudolph Valentino film.

Between 1974 and 1975, Böhm appeared prominently in four consecutive films from prolific New German Cinema director Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Martha, Effi Briest, Faustrecht der Freiheit (aka Fistfight of Freedom or Fox and His Friends), and Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt zum Himmel (Mother Küsters’ Trip to Heaven).

Bohm’s voice acting work has included narrating his father’s 1975 recording of Peter and the Wolf by Prokofiev and in 2009 as the German voice for Charles Muntz, villain in Pixar‘s tenth animated feature Up.

Since 1981, when he founded Menschen für Menschen (“Humans for Humans”), Böhm has been actively involved in charitable work in Ethiopia, for which in 2007 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Humanity, Peace and Brotherhood among Peoples. Karlheinz Böhm has been married to Almaz Böhm, a native of Ethiopia, since 1991. They have two children, Nicolas (born 1990) and Aida (born 1993). Böhm has five more children from previous marriages, among them, the actress Katharina Böhm (born 1964). In 2011 Almaz and Karlheinz Böhm were awarded the Essl Social Prize for the project Menschen für Menschen.^[1]

His Wikipedia entry can be accessed online here.

“Guardian” obituary:

Among contrasting roles in the career of the actor Karlheinz Böhm, who has died aged 86, were a romantic portrayal of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria in the hugely popular trio of Sissi films (1955, 1956, 1957), the creepy title role in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and unsympathetic characters in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the 1970s. In addition, as befitted the son of the great Austrian conductor Karl Böhm and the soprano Thea Linhard, he portrayed Schubert in Blossom Time (1958) and Beethoven in The Magnificent Rebel (1962).

Born in Darmstadt, Germany, where his father had recently been appointed director of music, Böhm studied philosophy at the University of Graz, Austria. Although his parents arranged for him to take piano lessons at an early age, he was not interested in a musical career, and instead pursued his passion for acting. So, in 1948, he went to Vienna to work as assistant to the director Karl Hartl on The Angel With the Trumpet, in which he also had a bit part Böhm’s first leading role was in 1952 in Alraune (Mandragore), the fifth version of Hanns Heinz Ewers’ novel of a child born to a prostitute by artificial insemination from a hanged man, who grows up to be a soulless femme fatale. Böhm, boyishly naive, falls in love with Alraune (Hildegard Knef), the creation of his mad scientist uncle (Erich von Stroheim). It began a series of roles for Böhm as a handsome, rather wooden juvenile lead in a number of insignificant films during a particularly fallow period of German cinema. Then came Sissi (1955), in which Böhm played Franz Joseph opposite Romy Schneider’s Princess Elizabeth of Austria. This was followed by Sissi, the Young Empress (1956) and Sissi: The Fateful Years of an Empress (1957). These kitschy Technicolor costume dramas, part operetta, part Hollywood-style biopic, proved immensely popular, and Böhm became a matinee idol.

Therefore, many filmgoers were shocked to see him in Powell’s disturbing thriller Peeping Tom (1960) as a serial killer of women, who records the fear and dying contortions of his victims on film. Böhm (whose slight German accent went unexplained) was Mark Lewis, whose childhood is haunted by his sadistic psychologist father (played by the director). Powell cast Böhm, because he thought he might know what it was like to be the son of an overbearing father. Böhm’s performance is the more chilling because the character is ostensibly a normal young man with whom the audience can identify. The critical outrage against the film almost finished Powell’s career, while for Böhm it began a new phase in English-language films and more international recognition. He played a French journalist hanging around a seamy Soho strip club, in Too Hot to Handle (1960), featuring Jayne Mansfield; one of the storytelling brothers (the other was Laurence Harvey, very different in looks and accent) in The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962); and an SS officer in Vincente Minnelli’s leaden The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (1962). It was for Walt Disney Productions that he appeared as a brooding and intense Beethoven in the highly fictionalised The Magnificent Rebel. One risible scene had Beethoven getting inspiration for the first notes of his 5th Symphony from the landlord rapping on his door to ask for the rent. Most of his subsequent films did little for his image, appearing as he did as charming villains in the fluffy Come Fly with Me (1963) – as a German baron using a flight attendant (Dolores Hart) for his smuggling plans – and the tepid spy spoof The Venetian Affair (1967). During the same period, he directed a few operas, including Elektra in Stuttgart and Tosca in Graz.

In 1968, a change came about the hitherto apolitical Böhm, prompted by the birth of the German student movement that year. “I was acting in Frankfurt at the time,” he recalled. “I was sitting in a trendy bar when a group of demonstrators went past. I couldn’t understand what made a bunch of young, well-off people take to the streets. But I started asking questions, and could see that we all have to take a moral and ethical stand.” A few years later, he met the radical film-maker Fassbinder, who deepened aspects of Böhm’s screen persona in four films. In Martha (1974), Böhm, as a brutal husband, brilliantly displays the sadism that was masked in Peeping Tom. He is a world-weary counsellor in Effi Briest (1975), a smooth antiques dealer in Fox and His Friends (1975) and a manipulative wealthy communist in Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975).

In 1981, Böhm was a celebrity guest on the popular television game show Wetten, dass…? (Wanna bet?) and bet that fewer than one in three people watching would donate at least one deutschmark or one Swiss franc to Ethiopia, the world’s third-poorest country. As a result, he raised the impressive sum of 1.2m marks, and went on to establish the charitable organisation Menschen für Menschen (People for People), raising money for the people of Ethiopia. Ten years later, in 1991, Böhm married (as his fourth wife) Almaz Teshome, an Ethiopian archaeologist. She later served on the board of the charity, becoming its chair in 2011. Boehm was made an honorary Ethiopian citizen in 2001. “Because they have recognised I didn’t come as a stranger, to show them what they have to do to get out of their poverty,” he explained. “No. I tried to find out what the people are missing, and how they can help themselves. My heart has become deeply Ethiopian in the deepest sense of the word. I don’t live only for myself any more, but I live for other people.”

Among Böhm’s several awards was the Berlinale Camera at the 2008 Berlin film festival. He is survived by Almaz , their two children, and five other children from his previous marriages, who include the actor Katerina Böhm.

• Karlheinz Böhm, actor and charity campaigner, born 16 March 1928; died 29 May 2014

Jurgen Prochnow. TCM Overview.

Jurgen Prochnow was born in Berlin in 1941. He studied acting at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen. His first filn was “One or the Other of Us” in 1974. He came to international prominence with the success of “Das Boot” in 1981. He went on to make films in the U.S. including “Dune” and “Beverly Hills Cop Two”.

His TCM biography|:

The ruggedly handsome, severe-looking German-born actor Jurgen Prochnow first achieved notice in his homeland for his work in “Die Verrohung des Franz Blum/The Brutalization of Franz Blum” (1974) and in “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum” (1975), co-directed by Volker Schlondorff and Margarethe Von Trotta. But it was as the captain of the ill-fated submarine in Wolfgang Petersen’s gripping WWII drama “Das Boot” (1981) that his career really took flight, earning him international recognition. Since his US film debut in “Comeback” (1982), Prochnow has tackled a steady diet of supporting characters, often humorless men of German extraction such as his sinister Captain Stolz in “A Dry White Season (1989) and the brutal Nazi interrogator in Anthony Minghella’s Oscar-winning “The English Patient” (1996).

Splitting his time between stage and screen throughout the 1970s, Prochnow established his most significant screen collaboration with Petersen, with whom he worked on the 1970 TV series “Harbor at the Rhine River” and the features “Einer von uns Beider/One or the Other” (1973), about an outsider trying to insinuate his way into high society, and “Die Konsequenz/The Consequence” (1977), a based-on-fact story of a homosexual prisoner who falls in love with the son of a guard. Following the success of “Das Boot”, Prochnow curtailed his theatrical ventures as his profile in international features increased, although he did tour Germany for four months in Arthur Miller’s “The Price” in 1989. On the big screen, one of his more interesting roles came as the mysterious boarder in “The Seventh Sign” (1988), starring Demi Moore. It was a part that required a balance between being both realistic and mystical while also demanding he wander continuously through and stand in the rain. The constant drenching might have daunted another actor but not one like Prochnow who had weathered the claustrophobic filming on the U-boat set. “A little rain is nothing. This is easy after ‘Das Boot’.”

Prochnow next starred in “The Man Inside”(1990), playing a West German journalist who g s undercover at a tabloid magazine to expose their unethical practices, revealing a government conspiracy to discredit a liberal politician. In “The Fourth War” (1990), Prochnow was a colonel in the Soviet army engaging in a personal battle with his American counterpart (Roy Scheider) at a boarder post between West Germany and Czechoslovakia. After playing a sailboat skipper battling the elements and personal demons on a journey from Gibraltar to Barbados in the straight-to-video thriller “Kill Cruise” (1991), Prochnow pursued the fugitive menace, “Robin Hood” (Fox, 1991), throughout Sherwood forest. A small part in “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” (1992) was followed by a meatier role as the sadistic leader of a terrorist group that hijacks a stealth bomber from the Air Force in “Interceptor” (1992).

Prochnow continued his penchant for low-grade, straight-to-video fair with “Hurricane Smith” (1992), playing a drug kingpin who reaps the whirlwind when he kills the sister of a badass Texan (Carl Weathers). He again played the heavy in “The Last Border” (1993), a post-apocalyptic thriller about a group of outlaws fighting against a militaristic government after most of the world’s population had been killed off by suffocating pollution. After playing a creepy physician in the cheekily titled “Body of Evidence” (1993), a trashy noir thriller starring Madonna as a femme fatale on trial for murdering a millionaire with rough sex, Prochnow was a rogue Russian spy trying to stop an American CIA agent (Timothy Dalton) in the Lifetime miniseries, “Lie Down with Lions” (1994). Back in the feature world, Prochnow upped his profile with a role as a corrupt judge allied with the evil brother (Armand Assante) of a futuristic lawman (Sylvester Stallone) in the dismal “Judge Dredd” (1995).

Prochnow continued to appear in more accessible features throughout the mid- to late-1990s, including “In the Mouth of Madness” (1995) in which he played a famed horror writer in the vein of Stephen King who g s missing from the small New England town that serves as the eerie setting for his terrifying novels. After playing a Nazi torturer responsible for removing the thumbs from a British spy (Willem Daf ) in “The English Patient” (1996), Prochnow had a nearly silent role in “Air Force One” (1997), playing a right-wing general from Kazakhstan who’s the reason for terrorists kidnapping the President of the United States (Harrison Ford) aboard his well-protected airplane. In the made-for-TV sci-fi thriller, “DNA” (1997), he was a run-of-the-mill mad scientist wreaks havoc on the world by recreating an alien being that had been stranded on earth centuries earlier through an unorthodox DNA experiment. Playing the arch villain yet again, Prochnow was a vile henchman sent to kill an assassin (Chow Yun-Fat) unwilling to follow through on murdering a police officer (Michael Rooker) for a Chinatown crime boss (Kenneth Tsang) in “The Replacement Killers” (1998).

Prochnow was finally on the right side of the law in “The Human Bomb” (1998), playing the head of an anti-terrorist unit sent to diffuse the so-called Ecobomber who holds an American teacher (Patsy Kensit) and her students ransom for 50 million marks which he wants to be used in his efforts to help the poor and clean up the planet. He appeared in two more made-for-television movies- “Heaven’s Fire” (Fox Family Channel, 1999), a heist thriller involving the theft of $100 bill engraving plates from the U.S. Treasury, and “Esther” (PAX, 1999), the story of the Biblical queen of Persia who saved the Jews from genocide-before going back to features with “Wing Commander” (1999), a misguided take on the once-popular series of video games in which he played a federation commander in the year 2654. Prochnow rounded out the millennium with “The Last Stop” (1999), a straight-to-video thriller about a group of strangers stranded inside a remote mountain lodge during a raging storm-only top discover that one of them is a murderer.

Despite some appearances in several Hollywood blockbusters, Prochnow had difficulty making a household name for himself even though most would have recognized his face. After appearing in a few straight-to-video action thrillers-“The Last Run” (2001), “The Elite” (2001) and “Gunblast Vodka” (2001)-Prochnow shifted gears with a supporting role in the biting independent dramedy, “Jack the Dog” (2001). Two more cheap releases-“Dark Asylum” (2001) and “Ripper” (2002)-were followed by a degrading appearance in “House of the Dead” (2003) as a barge captain named Kirk who ferries a group of spoiled college brats to an island where certain death awaits them in the form of zombies the control of an undead Spanish priest (David Palffy). Unintentional laughs and box office failure ensued. Meanwhile, he had a small supporting role in the straight-to-video release, “Heart of America: Homeroom” (2005), a teen-angst drama about two high school seniors who commit to a murder-suicide pact to take weapons to school and exact revenge upon their tormentors.

Prochnow received his highest profile role with “See Arnold Run” (A&E, 2005), playing the older version of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a ridiculous and often painful biopic of the former bodybuilder and movie star-turned-Governator of Kahl-eee-fornia. While more than a few critics blasted the movie for being cheap and schmaltzy, particular scorn was heaped on Prochnow-everything from his awkward performance to his lack of resemblance to Schwarzenegger was called into question. He next fell into his fallback position as ruthless villain for “The Celestine Prophecy” (2006), a spiritual adventure about a man (Matthew Settle) who travels to Peru in pursuit of an ancient manuscript containing the so-called Nine Insights. Continuing along with religious-themed material, Prochnow next appeared in one of the most anticipated and controversial films in decades, “The Da Vinci Code” (2006), directed by Ron Howard from Dan Brown’s mega-bestselling novel, which told the story of a famed symbologist (Tom Hanks) who is called to the Louvre where the murder of a curator has left behind a trail of mysterious symbols and clues leading to a secret society that has spent the past 2000 years guarding a secret that could destroy the very foundations of society if it were revealed.

His TCM biography can be accessed online at TCM here.

ticle in “The Telegraph”:

Mark Monahan continues our profiles of cinema’s unsung heroes

It’s said that Jürgen Prochnow was considered for the role of the Terminator in James Cameron’s 1984 chase-movie, and certainly there’s a steely intensity to the 6ft 1in German actor that would have made him a scary killer.

Born in 1941, he was a regular on German television when his countryman Wolfgang Peterson made him the lead in his 1981 U-boat drama Das Boot.

Prochnow brought immense dignity to his beleaguered submariner, sparking a successful, often martial career in German and American movies. He was a captain in Michael Mann’s The Keep (1983), a major in The English Patient (1996) and a general in Air Force One (1997).

And, to judge by its £30 million or so UK takings to date, there’s barely a British soul who hasn’t clocked him recently as André Vernet in The Da Vinci Code, a typically strong performance in an undeserving film.

This article can be accessed online here.

Helmut Griem was a German actor whose best known role internationally was in 1972 in “Cabaret” with Liza Minnelli and Michael York. He was born in Hamburg in 1932. His other films include “The Damned” and “Ludwig” both directed by Luchino Visconti. He made the “McKenzie Break” in Ireland. He died in 2004 aged 72.

His obituary from “The Independent”:

Helmut Griem, actor: born Hamburg, Germany 6 April 1932; died Munich, Germany 19 November 2004. Blond and handsome, Helmut Griem was one of the few German actors to become internationally successful. Equally at home on screen, on television or on the stage, where he played in both classical and modern roles, including musicals, he will be best remembered by mainstream audiences for his appearance in Bob Fosse’s film version of Cabaret (1972). Griem played Max, the decadent, bisexual baron, described by Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) as “divinely sexy”, and few will forget the moment in the film when the exasperated writer Brian (Michael York) angrily tells Sally, “Screw Max!”, to which she softly responds, “I do.” After a brief silence, he shakes her repose by replying, “So do I.” Helmut Griem was perfect as the arrogant, aristocratic and fun-loving playboy who shrugs his shoulders with indifference when his friend Brian points out the chilling portents, as they witness members of the Hitler Youth singing their anthem, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”. Earlier, Griem had made his breakthrough as a film actor when cast by Luchino Visconti in The Damned (1969) as Aschenbach, the cruelly cynical SS officer, whose lust for power knows no bounds. Born in Hamburg in 1932, Griem planned to be a journalist, but, after studying literature, science and philosophy, he developed an interest in acting, and made his stage début with a role in N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker (1956). For over a decade he worked mainly in the theatre, in Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin and Munich, his roles including the frustrated professor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady. He made his screen début in Fabrik der Offiziere (1960), but his first important film role was in a screen version of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami (1968). His screen potential was fully realised in The Damned, Visconti’s dramatisation dealing with the Krupp family whose steel empire assisted Hitler’s rise to power. Griem was both cruel and seductive as the SS officer who insidiously gains control of the steelworks. In Lamont Johnson’s tautly gripping The McKenzie Break (1970), which dealt with the rare subject of German prisoners in an Allied prisoner-of- war camp, Griem was a captured U-boat captain who organises a well-planned escape. Though again cruel and calculating (he calmly lets a hut roof collapse, killing his commanding officer and fellow prisoners, because the distraction will aid his escape), he invested the character with human qualities and subtle shadings that made his battle of wits with the prison officer (Brian Keith) intensely compelling. Griem worked for Visconti again in the spectacular but hollow biography Ludwig (1972), and in 1975 he starred in the Israeli-British co- production Children of Rage, which took a thoughtful if over-talkative look at the issues behind the violence in Palestine, as seen by an Israeli doctor (Griem) at a refugee camp. Voyage of the Damned (1976) was a star- laden vehicle telling the true story of Jewish refugees stranded on an ocean liner in 1939. He was part of another starry cast, including Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum, Rod Steiger and Curt Jurgens, in Breakthrough (1979), a splendid sequel to Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (1977). Griem played Major Stransky, the ambitious officer portrayed by Maximilian Schell in the earlier film. The following year he starred in Phillip Braun’s The Glass Cell, a German version of Patricia Highsmith’s thriller. In 1980 he was seen on television in Fassbinder’s classic mini-series Berlin Alexanderplatz, and most of his career afterwards was on stage or television. His TV roles included that of Alexander Menshikov in the mini-series Peter the Great (1986) and Rommel in The Plot to Kill Hitler (1990). In the theatre, he made acclaimed appearances in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane, J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden. In 1997 he triumphed as Willie Loman in a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. He made his final television appearance two years ago in an episode of the popular crime series SK Kolsch. Tom Vallance

Website dedicated to Helmut Griem, please click here.

Helmut Dantine was born in Vienna in 1917. In 1938 during the Anchluss, he was captured and placed in a Nazi concentration camp. His parents managed to get him released and he escaped to Calfornia. His parents were later to perish in a con centration camp. His first film was “International Squadron” in 1941. The following year he played the German flyer harboring in Greer Garson’s garden in “Mrs Miniver”. Among his other films are “Mission to Moscow”, “Northern Pursuit” and “To Be or Not To Be”. He also became a wealthy businessman. He died in 1982 aged 64.

His IMDB mini biography:

Actor/director/producer Helmut Dantine was born in Vienna, Austria on October 7, 1917. He made a name for himself as an actor during World War Two playing German soldiers and Nazi villains in Hollywood films, most notably in Mrs. Miniver (1942). The young Dantine was a fervent anti-fascist/anti-Nazi activist in Vienna. As a leader in the anti-Nazi youth movement the 19-year old was summarily rounded up and imprisoned at the Rosserlaende concentration camp. Family influence persuaded a physician to grant him a medical release that June and he was immediately sent to Los Angeles to stay with the only friend they had in America. Dantine joined the Pasadena Playhouse, where he was spotted by a Warner Bros. talent scout who was struck by Dantine’s dark good looks. Signed to a Warner’s contract, he appeared in a variety of films after making his debut as a Nazi in International Squadron (1941) starring Ronald Reagan. He played supporting, second lead and eventually, lead roles in such films as Casablanca (1942) (where he was the newlywed who gambles away his visa money), Edge of Darkness (1943) (his first lead), the infamous Mission to Moscow (1943) and Passage to Marseille (1944). Two of his best films came on loan-out from Warners in 1942: Ernst Lubitsch‘s comic masterpiece To Be or Not to Be (1942) and William Wyler‘s Oscar-winning Mrs. Miniver(1942). Dantine directed the the unsuccessful Thundering Jets (1958). His wife, Niki Dantine, was the daughter of Loew’s president Nicholas Schenck, the overall boss of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer — ostensibly the most powerful man in Hollywood since 1927. After Schenck was forced out of Loew’s, the wily old movie veteran formed his own production and distribution company. In 1959, Dantine’s acting career was on the wane and his attempt to become a director a relative failure, he became a producer. He was appointed vice-president of his father-in-law’s Schenck Enterprises, eventually becoming president of the company in 1970. Dantine produced three minor Sam Peckinpah films in the mid-1970s, including Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) and The Killer Elite (1975) in both of which,he had small supporting roles. Helmut Dantine died on May 2, 1982, at age 64. in Beverly Hills after suffering a massive heart attack. His body was interred at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood

His IMDB entry can be accessed online here.

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 obituary in “The Guardian” in 2006.

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

Her IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

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)

Virna Lisi obituary in “The Daily Telegraph”.

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