The Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, One of the greatest stars in the history of cinema, died this Monday, aged 95, according to local press reports.
Lollobrigida, one of the undisputed muses of Italian cinema, had recently been admitted to a clinic in Rome after suffering a fractured femur last September.
A century would be enough, especially for Gina Lollobrigida. The mythical Italian actress, who passed away this Monday, 16, at the age of 95, had a cinematic life, filled with jewels and glamour, but which culminated in a sentimental farce that marred her final days.
Lollobrigida is an undisputed muse of the great pantheon of Italian cinematography, crowned as an icon of Mediterranean beauty and yet deeply marked throughout her life by love, heartbreak and, of course, lawsuits.
Luigina Lollobrigida was born in Subiaco on July 4, 1927, the daughter of a wealthy family who lost their assets in the Second World WarIn 1947, at the age of 20, he moved to nearby Rome, where he began studying Fine Arts.
As she explains in her biography, she was the “privileged” one in a family of “refugees” who lived in a harsh room and ate “what little she could gather.”
The springboard into show business came with her arrival in the city, when she appeared on the stage of the “Miss Roma” contest, in which she came second, and was then invited to the final of “Miss Italia”, in which Lucía Bosé finally triumphed.
Little by little, the young woman managed to enter the Cinecittà studios in Rome, playing small roles, and three years later she received an offer from millionaire producer Howard Huges to take a plane and fly to the effervescent Hollywood.
However, she soon regretted it, realizing that she could only work in her patron's productions, and it was then that she decided to return to her Rome to begin a career that would establish her as one of the most applauded actresses in Europe.
His first successes came under the orders of Luigi Zampa, with tapes such as Return of the Lost (1949). In 1952, she starred alongside French divo Gérard Philipe in Fanfan La Tulipe, by French director Christian-Jaque, a film that won awards in Cannes and Berlin, which gave him great visibility on the continent.
It was the beginning of a career in which, with her deep gaze and exuberant bust, she played more than 60 films, in addition to many other plays or roles in television series.
All the directors of the 1950s loved it, but it was Luigi Comencini who propelled it to its greatest splendor in Bread, Love and Fantasy (1953), with which he won his first prize, the Nastro d'Argento, thanks to a remembered role with Vittorio de Sica.
At that time he worked on major international productions, such as The Devil Laughed Last (1953), with Humphrey Bogart; Trapeze (1956), with Tony Curtis, or The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1956), along with hunchback Anthony Quinn.
Perhaps one of his most emblematic works is the production with the ominous title The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (1956), together with Vittorio Gassman, in which he sang fragments of Tosca, by Giacomo Puccini.
Consecrated as one of the great icons of “Italianity”, Lollobrigida gradually distanced herself from the world of cinema, in which she won numerous awards, with the exception of Oscar.
At the same time, her private life was always in the spotlight: in 1949, she married the Yugoslav doctor Milko Skofic, with whom she had a son, Andrea, and from whom she divorced in 1971. And her relationship with the Spanish businessman Javier Rigau is remembered. , 34 years younger than her.
The actress ended up denouncing him for fraud and document falsification for the “proxy” marriage they entered into in 2010, although her husband was finally acquitted in March 2017 and the marriage was also annulled by the hand of Pope Francis himself.
That year, she could be seen at the Court of Rome in apparently good condition, with her iconic carding, an intense red cape, high-heeled boots, her inseparable sunglasses and accompanied by two assistants.
Gina lived in a villa on Via Appia Antica, in Rome, and had the help of her assistant Andrea Piazzolla, who Rigau and the star's family recently denounced, accusing him of manipulating her and squandering her fortune.
The truth is that in recent years the star, who was suffering from signs of senile dementia, was forced to auction off her imposing jewelry box.
A vital part of his assets, such as the furniture in his mansion, ended up in a deposit kept by order of the judge, after the family began its offensive against the wasteful Piazzolla. (State Agency)
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