Italian movie legend Gina Lollobrigida lifeless at age 95 – Nationwide

Italian movie legend Gina Lollobrigida, who achieved worldwide stardom through the Nineteen Fifties and was dubbed “essentially the most lovely girl on this planet” after the title of one in every of her films, died in Rome on Monday, her agent stated. She was 95.

The agent, Paola Comin, didn’t present particulars. Lollobrigida had surgical procedure in September to restore a thigh bone damaged in a fall. She returned house and stated she had rapidly resumed strolling.

A drawn portrait of the diva graced a 1954 cowl of Time journal, which likened her to a “goddess” in an article about Italian movie-making. Greater than a half-century later, Lollobrigida nonetheless turned heads along with her brown, curly hair and statuesque determine, and most well-liked to be referred to as an actress as an alternative of the gender-neutral time period actor.

“Lollo,” as she was lovingly nicknamed by Italians, started making films in Italy simply after the tip of World Conflict II, because the nation started to advertise on the massive display screen a stereotypical idea of Mediterranean magnificence as buxom and brunette.

Moreover The World’s Most Lovely Girl in 1955, profession highlights included Golden Globe-winner Come September, with Rock Hudson; Trapeze; Beat the Satan, a 1953 John Huston movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones; and Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, which gained Lollobrigida Italy’s high film award, a David di Donatello, as finest actress in 1969.

In Italy, she labored with a number of the nation’s high administrators following the warfare, together with Mario Monicelli, Luigi Comencini, Pietro Germi and Vittorio De Sica.

Two of her extra well-liked movies at house have been Comencini’s Pane Amore e Fantasia (Bread, Love and Goals) in 1953, and the sequel a 12 months later, Pane Amore e Gelosia (Bread, Love and Jealousy). Her male foil was Vittorio Gassman, one in every of Italy’s main males on the display screen.

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Lollobrigida additionally was an completed sculptor, painter and photographer, and finally primarily dropped movie for the opposite arts. Together with her digital camera, she roamed the world 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 photograph reportage.

Lollobrigida was born on July 4, 1927, in Subiaco, a picturesque hill city close to Rome, the place her father was a furnishings maker. Lollobrigida started her profession in magnificence contests, posing for the covers of magazines and making temporary appearances in minor movies. Producer Mario Costa plucked her from the streets of Rome to look on the massive display screen.

Eccentric mogul Howard Hughes finally introduced Lollobrigida to america, the place she carried out with a few of Hollywood’s main males of the Nineteen Fifties and 60s, together with Frank Sinatra, Sean Connery, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Yul Brynner.

Over time, her co-stars additionally included Europe’s dapperest male stars of the period, amongst them Louis Jourdan, Fernando Rey, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Alec Guinness.

Whereas Lollobrigida performed some dramatic roles, her intercourse image picture outlined her profession, and her hottest characters have been in lighthearted comedies such because the Bread, Love trilogy.

With lush eyelashes and thick, brown curls framing her face, Lollobrigida began a coiffure rage within the Nineteen Fifties referred to as the “poodle minimize.” Gossip columnists commented on alleged rivalries between her and Sophia Loren, one other Italian movie star celebrated for her magnificence,

In center age, Lollobrigida’s romance with a person 34 years her junior, Javier Rigau, from Barcelona, Spain, stored gossip pages buzzing for years.

“I’ve at all times had a weak spot for youthful males as a result of they’re beneficiant and don’t have any complexes,” the actress advised Spain’s Hola journal. After greater than 20 years of courting, in 2006, the then-79-year-old Lollobrigida introduced that she would marry Rigau, however the marriage ceremony by no means occurred.

Her first marriage, to Milko Skofic, a Yugoslavia-born physician, led to divorce in 1971.

Within the final years of her life, Lollobrigida’s title extra regularly appeared in articles by journalists masking Rome’s courts, not the glamour scene, as authorized battles have been waged over whether or not she had the psychological competence to are likely to her funds.

On her web site, Lollobrigida recalled how her household misplaced its home through the bombings of World Conflict II and went to reside in Rome. She studied sculpture and portray at a highschool devoted to the humanities, whereas her two sisters labored as film theatre ushers to permit her to proceed her research.

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