“Ciao Lollo”: Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida is dead

Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, here in 1991 at the Cannes Film Festival, died on January 16, 2023 in Rome, at the age of 95.

AFP - JACQUES DEMARTHON

Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow

3 mins

Gina Lollobrigida, icon of post-war cinema in Hollywood and unforgettable Esmeralda in

 by Jean Delannoy alongside Anthony Quinn, died on Monday January 16 at the age of 95.

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Voted favorite world actress in 1961 by the Golden Globe, she has had her Star on the Walk of Fame since 2018 in Hollywood.

When announcing her death, Italian Culture Minister Gennaro Sagiuliano tweeted: “ 

 ”.

Gina Lollobrigida has played with the greatest actors, from Anthony Quinn to Yul Brynner, and shot with the greatest directors: Jean Delannoy, René Clair, Orson Welles, John Hutson and Vittorio De Sica, Jerzy Skolimowski, up to Agnès Varda for which she embodies the fairy of cinema in

in 1995.

Turning

At the beginning of her career, she will have tried everything to escape her modest origins.

Born on July 4, 1927 in Subiaco, a small village in the heart of Abruzzo, in central Italy, under the name of Luigina Lollobrigida, she is the daughter of a worker, but quickly seeks the light.

First student in Rome, at the Academy of Fine Arts, she also plays theater and participates in beauty contests.

At the age of 24, she came third in the Miss Italy contest.

It is with a photo-novel, where she hid behind a pseudonym, that she broke through for the first time in the middle of the cinema, but remained initially confined to secondary roles.

Her marriage to the doctor Milko Skofic will be a turning point in her private and professional life.

Her husband converted to become his wife's successful impresario.

The first big role will be entrusted to Gina Lollobrigida in 1952 by a French director, Christian-Jaque.

, a cloak-and-dagger film starring Gérard Philipe and a great popular success, was his first highly acclaimed performance.

In the same year, she continued with 

by René Clair.

Subsequently, a veritable cinematic boulevard opens up in front of it.

Two years later, she received her first distinction as an actress, the Agent Ribbon for Best Leading Actress for

Luigi Comencini's

She will be

Luigi Zampa's

, and plays Esmeralda with incredible intensity, between guardian angel and femme fatale, even standing up to Anthony Quinn in her role as Quasimodo.

Having become a sex symbol and Hollywood icon, she gives the reply to Humphrey Bogart in 

by John Huston.

Without forgetting his role in

by British director Carol Reed, with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, or his appearance alongside Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen in 

, in 1959.

Foray into politics

In the early 1960s, his star began to fade.

Despite prestigious distributions, for example with Rock Hudson, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Sean Connery or Jean-Louis-Trintignant, his films no longer seduce as many spectators as before.

In 1968, she decided to change direction.

She divorced and turned to photography before stopping completely with the cinema in 1973. Despite this, she has always remained in the hearts of spectators, thanks to her old films, but also thanks to her appearances in television films, including several episodes of

, an American series with global success during the 1980s.

At the end of her life, she even tried to enter politics.

First by accepting in 1999 to become a goodwill ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, then by trying (in vain) to become a Member of the European Parliament on the list of Antonio Di Pietro, the former anti-corruption magistrate.

But the main thing for her was above all to return to her first love, the fine arts.

Before fracturing her femur when she fell in her Roman home last September, she assiduously practiced photography and sculpture for the last decades.

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