Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, a voluptuous brunette who burst onto the screen after the war in Hollywood, has died at the age of 95, the Italian Minister of Culture announced on Monday.
The former sex symbol had fractured her femur when she fell at her Roman home in September and had to be operated on.
“Farewell to a diva of the big screen, protagonist of more than half a century of Italian cinema history. Its charm is eternal. Ciao Lollo,” Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano tweeted.
Her interpretations of Esmeralda, the Queen of Sheba or Adeline in Fanfan the Tulip elevated him to sex symbol status, but Gina Lollobrigida was a mythical beauty who regretted never having found a soul mate.
Luigina Lollobrigida was born on July 4, 1927 in the small village of Subiaco, in the heart of Abruzzo, in the mountains of central Italy, into a modest family who then moved to Rome.
A student of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, passionate about drawing and sculpture, she took her first steps in the cinema somewhat by chance.
“I didn’t want to be an actress, but an artist. I was just an extra to bring some money home. Then I was offered a real role. It wasn’t what I wanted. I thought, ‘I’m going there and I’m asking them for the moon, a million.’ They gave it to me and I started making movies,” she told Vanity Fair Italy in 2007.
For four years, from 1947 to 1951, she obtained only secondary roles, until fanfan the tulip by Christian-Jaque and its 6.7 million spectators won it in 1952.
This little brunette with voluptuous shapes and smoldering eyes then continues The beauties of the night by René Clair in 1952 and Bread, love and fantasy by Luigi Comencini in 1953.
Gina Lollobrigida plays with the greatest actors: Frank Sinatra, Sean Connery, Marcello Mastroianni, Yul Brynner or Humphrey Bogart in stronger than the devil in 1954 and Anthony Quinn in Notre Dame of Paris by Jean Delannoy (1956), where she plays Esmeralda.
She toured the United States until 1962, then ended up returning to Italy. She then acted only occasionally for the cinema and for television, appearing in a few films of the 1990s such as XXL by Ariel Zeitoun with Gérard Depardieu and The Hundred and One Nights of Simon Cinema by Agnes Varda.
A passion: sculpture
In a sign that her aura hasn’t waned, a 2013 auction of her jewelry skyrocketed, with pearl drop earrings fetching $2.39 million, surpassing a previous record set by goldsmiths. similar jewelry from Elizabeth Taylor.
But, in the meantime, “La Lollo” had returned to her first artistic love, photography and then sculpture, to which she devoted herself entirely in the early 1980s.
“I have always preferred sculpture. I gave myself to the cinema and I don’t regret it, but when the cinema changed, I decided to rediscover my passion”, confided the star on the occasion of the inauguration in Paris of his first exhibition, which had also presented in Moscow and Venice.
She mainly sculpts characters, often women who look like her in her greatest roles.
His only regret? To have “never found a soul mate” and to have known only “one-sided” love, she declared to Vanity Fair in 2007.
In 1969, Gina Lollobrigida had divorced Milko Skofic, the doctor whom she had married in 1949 and from whom she had her only son, Milko Jr, who gave her a grandson.
In 2006, at the age of 79, Gina Lollobrigida hit the headlines when she announced her wedding to Spanish entrepreneur Javier Rigau Rafols, 34 years her junior. But the couple split amid turmoil and legal battles a few months later.
During a television program in November 2017, she also revealed, with modesty and dignity, to have suffered two sexual assaults in her youth. “It stays in you and it marks your character,” she assured.
She was also involved in two trials. In the first, the Court of Cassation imposed on him a guardian for the management of his assets. In the second, still in progress, his ex-handyman is accused of abuse of weakness towards him.
A UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, the actress also ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the European Parliament in 1999 on the list of a left-wing party. She will try in 2022, again in vain, to obtain a seat in the Italian Senate.
In France, she was made an officer of arts and letters in 1986 and a commander in 2004. But she had to wait until February 2018 to have her star in Hollywood.