Gina Lollobrigida

Gina Lollobrigida, the Italian-born film star who was among Hollywood's most sought-after female actresses in the 1950s and '60s and was frequently ...

She began her career in her native Italy and, although she achieved fame in America worked more often in Europe. She later had a second career as an artist ...

Lollobrigida appeared on television in Europe and the United States, including the “Falcon Crest” episodes and an American television movie, “Deceptions” (1985), in which she played an excitable duchess entertaining in Venice. The next year she appeared in “Miss Italia,” inspired by her real-life experience: She had come in third in the 1947 Miss Italy pageant. Campbell” in 1969 and for a recurring role on the prime-time television soap “Falcon Crest” in 1985. She was one of four daughters of Giovanni Lollobrigida, a furniture maker, and Giuseppina (Mercuri) Lollobrigida. She wrote, directed and produced “Ritratto di Fidel,” a documentary based on her exclusive interview with Fidel Castro, the Communist leader of Cuba, which was shown at the 1975 Berlin film festival. Lollobrigida was always considered more a sex symbol than a serious actress — at least by the American press — but she was also nominated for a BAFTA award as best foreign actress in “Pane, Amore e Fantasia” (1953). She ran unsuccessfully for the European Parliament in 1999. She published her first book of photographs, “Italia Mia,” in 1973. That film, and the attention she garnered in “Fanfan la Tulipe,” an Italian-French period comedy released in the United States the same year, were enough to put her on the cover of Time magazine in 1954. She won the Donatello twice more, for “Venere Imperial” (1962), in a tie with A 1955 film, “La Donna Più Bella del Mondo” (“The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” — a term some in Hollywood came to use about Ms. 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 and partner in crime.

Italian screen legend Gina Lollobrigida has died at the age of 95, news agency ANSA reported, citing members of her family.

When film roles began to dwindle in the 1970s, Lollobrigida made a new career for herself as a photojournalist. By the early 1950s, she was a huge star in Europe. She was Esmerelda to Anthony Quinn’s Quasimodo in the 1956 adaptation of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” and the Queen of Sheba to Yul Brynner’s King Solomon in King Vidor’s 1959 Technicolor epic “Solomon and Sheba.”

ROME — Italian film legend Gina Lollobrigida, who achieved international stardom during the 1950s and was dubbed "the most beautiful woman in the world" ...

On her website, Lollobrigida recalled how her family lost its house during the bombings of World War II and went to live in Rome. Producer Mario Costa plucked her from the streets of Rome to appear on the big screen. After more than 20 years of dating, in 2006, the then-79-year-old Lollobrigida announced that she would marry Rigau, but the wedding never happened. More than a half-century later, Lollobrigida still turned heads with her brown, curly hair and statuesque figure, and preferred to be called an actress instead of the gender-neutral term actor. Her male foil was Vittorio Gassman, one of Italy's leading men on the screen. Lollobrigida had surgery in September to repair a thigh bone broken in a fall.

Gina Lollobrigida, who has died at the age of 95, shot to fame in the 1950s as a sultry Mediterranean sex symbol, then became a photographer and sculptor ...

"Jewels are meant to give pleasure and for many years I had enormous pleasure wearing mine," she said. They separated after nearly 17 years, and Lollobrigida said later she had no intention of remarrying. Tempestuous and impulsive by nature, she made headlines again in 2006, when, at age 79, she announced that she would marry a man 34 years her junior. I am a cumbersome woman," she told an interviewer when she was 80. I am more used to having falsehoods written about me." (The winner that year was Lucia Bose.) "All my life I wanted a real love, an authentic love, but I have never had one. In 1975 she made a documentary film "Portrait of Fidel Castro," and for years was surrounded by rumours that she had had an affair with the Cuban leader. In 2013, when she was 85, an auction of her jewellery by Sotheby's in Geneva fetched $4.9 million and set a record for a pair of diamond and pearl earrings, which sold for $2.37 million. In her later years she returned to her first love, sculpting, keeping a summer home in the Tuscan city of Pietrasanta, an artist's colony where she worked with sculptors such as Bottero. She burst to fame in Italy with the leading roles in two Italian comedies by Luigi Comencini - "Bread, Love and Dreams," and "Bread, Love and Jealousy". A role opposite Humphrey Bogart in John Huston's 1954 film "Beat the Devil," sealed her worldwide fame and in 1955 she made what became one of her signature films, "The World's Most Beautiful Woman".

She was one of the most recognisable cinema icons of the 1950s and 1960s. Read more at straitstimes.com.

When she stopped making films full-time, Lollobrigida developed new careers as a photographer and sculptor and was a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund and its Food and Agriculture Organisation. In her later years, she spent much of her time divided between a secluded villa behind walls on Rome’s ancient Appian Way in the southern part of the Italian capital and the Tuscan artists’ colony of Pietrasanta, where she kept a sculptor’s studio. In September, she failed in a bid to win a seat in the Italian parliament for a leftist political party at national elections.

Actress Gina Lollobrigida, veteran Italian actor and once adjudged as the 'Most Beautiful Woman in the World, dies at 95.

The views expressed here are that of the respective authors/ entities and do not represent the views of Economic Times (ET). [Howard Hughes](/topic/howard-hughes). She had worked with renowned Italian directors like Luigi Comencini, [Pietro Germi](/topic/pietro-germi)and [Vittorio De Sica](/topic/vittorio-de-sica). Gina Lollobrigida was affectionately called “Lollo” and she was adorned with the “Most Beautiful Woman in the World” title. [Lollobrigida](/topic/lollobrigida)was 95. [Mrs Campbell](/topic/mrs-campbell)".