Rome, Jan. 17 (BNA): The legend of Italian cinema, Gina Lollobrigida, who achieved international stardom during the fifties of the last century and was dubbed “the most beautiful woman in the world” after the title of one of her films, died in Rome on Monday. said the agent. She was 95 years old.
Agent Paula Comin did not provide any details. Lollobrigida underwent surgery in September to repair a broken femur in a fall. She came home and said she quickly resumed walking, reports the Associated Press.
A painted portrait of the singer appeared on the 1954 cover of Time magazine, which wrote an article about the Italian film industry.
More than half a century later, Lollobrigida still turns heads with her brown, curly hair and acting persona, preferring to be called an actress rather than the gender-neutral term actor.
Lulu, as the Italians called her by her nickname, began making films in Italy just after the end of World War II, as the country began promoting on the big screen a stereotypical notion of Mediterranean beauties as brunettes and brunettes.
Besides 1955’s “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” highlights of her career included the Golden Globe-winning “Come September” with Rock Hudson; “swing;” Beat the Devil is a 1953 John Huston movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones. and “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell” which won the Lollobrigida Italy Award for Best Picture, David Di Donatello as Best Actress in 1969.
In Italy, she worked with some of the country’s top post-war directors, including Mario Monicelli, Luigi Comencini, Pietro Germi, and Vittorio De Sica.
Two of her most popular home movies were Comincini’s “Pane Amore e Fantasia” (“Bread, Love and Dreams”) in 1953, and the sequel a year later, “Pane Amore e Gelosia” (“Bread, Love and Jealousy”). Her mention was Vittorio Gassmann, one of Italy’s leading men on screen.
Lollobrigida was also an accomplished sculptor, painter, and photographer, eventually dropping film for the other arts. Her camera has traveled the world from what was then the Soviet Union to Australia. In 1974 Fidel Castro hosted her as a guest in Cuba for 12 days as she was working on a photo report.
Lollobrigida was born on July 4, 1927 in Subiaco, a picturesque hill town near Rome, where her father was a furniture maker. Lollobrigida began her career in beauty pageants, appearing on magazine covers and appearing in minor films. Producer Mario Costa snatched her from the streets of Rome to appear on the big screen.
Eccentric mogul Howard Hughes brought Lollobrigida to the United States, where she sang with some of Hollywood’s leading men of the ’50s and ’60s, including Frank Sinatra, Sean Connery, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Yul Brynner.
Over the years, its stars also included the most European male stars of the era, among them Louis Jordan, Fernando Rey, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Alec Genis.
While Lollobrigida played some dramatic roles, her sexual image defined the code of her career, and her most popular characters were in light comedies such as the “Bread, Love” trilogy.
With lush eyelashes and thick brown curls framing her face, Lollobrigida started off a 1950s hairstyle known as the “poodle cut”. Gossip columnists commented on the alleged rivalries between her and Sophia Loren, another celebrated Italian film star, for her beauty,
In middle age, Lollobrigida’s romance with a man 34 years her junior, Javier Rigau, from Barcelona, Spain, has kept the gossip pages buzzing for years.
“I have always had a weakness for younger men, because they are generous and have no obstacles,” the actress told the Spanish magazine “Hola”. After more than 20 years of dating, in 2006, 79-year-old Lollobrigida announced that she was getting married to Rigau, but the wedding never took place.
Her first marriage, to Milko Skovic, a Yugoslav-born physician, ended in divorce in 1971.
In the last years of her life, Lollobrigida’s name appeared frequently in articles by journalists who covered the courts of Rome, not the witchcraft scene, where legal battles broke out over whether she had the mental competence to look after her finances.
On her website, Lollobrigida recalled how her family lost their home during the bombing of World War II and went to live in Rome. She studied sculpture and painting at a high school devoted to the arts, while her two sisters worked as filmmakers to allow her to continue her studies.