Gina Lollobrigida, the Italian movie actress who became one of the post-World War II era’s first major European sex symbols, has died. She was 95.
Lollobrigida had already appeared in more than two dozen European films when she made her first English-language movie, John Huston’s 1953 camp drama, Beat the Devil, in which she played Humphrey Bogart’s wife. She was Esmerelda to Anthony Quinn’s Quasimodo in the 1956 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the Queen of Sheba to Yul Brynner’s King Solomon in the 1959 big screen epic Solomon and Sheba.
Lollobrigida was the subject an Orson Welles-directed television project, Portrait of Gina — also known as Viva Italia.
Welles left the only copy of Viva Italia in a Paris hotel room. The unmarked film cans were eventually moved to a storage facility. The film was thought to be permanently lost until it was found in 1986 and shown at the Venice Film Festival.
Reportedly, Lollobrigida was unhappy with the rediscovered film and took action. It subsequently aired on German television and can be found on YouTube.
After her film career wound down in the early 1970s, Ms. Lollobrigida appeared on television in Europe and the United States, including episodes of “Falcon Crest” and an American television movie, “Deceptions” (1985), in which she played an excitable duchess entertaining in Venice. Her last feature film appearance was in “XXL” (1997), a French comedy, also starring Gérard Depardieu, about a Jewish family in the garment trade.
She ran unsuccessfully for the European Parliament in 1999.
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