Gina Lollobrigida arrives on the red carpet during the 4th Rome International Film Festival in Rome on October 16, 2009. She died Monday at age 95. File Photo by David Silpa/UPI | License Photo Posted on 01/16/2023 9:36:26 AM PST by Red Badger
Gina Lollobrigida arrives on the red carpet during the 4th Rome International Film Festival in Rome on October 16, 2009. She died Monday at age 95. File Photo by David Silpa/UPI | License Photo
Jan. 16 (UPI) -- Italian screen legend Gina Lollobrigida, whose sultry roles in the 1950s and 1960s established her as a international sex symbol, has died, Italian media reported Monday. She was 95.
Known affectionately to her countrymen as "La Bersagliera" for her starring role in Luigi Comencini's 1953 film Bread, Love and Dreams, Lollobrigida's family broke the news of her death, the Italian agency ANSA reported.
She was hospitalized with a fractured femur and underwent an operation in September following a fall at home, the news service said. The injury came as she was campaigning for an Italian Senate seat.
Four years ago she was similarly hospitalized after a domestic accident.
Lollobrigida was last seen in public on Nov. 21 during a tearful appearance on Italian television in which she talked about a long battle over her estate in which she was fighting against her son and grandson over her move to include her former butler into her will.
"I have the right to live but also to die in peace," she told the RAI Television interviewer.
Lollobrigida appeared in more than 60 movies in a career as a screen diva that took off in the 1950s. She quickly became one of the most recognizable figures of the Italian postwar neorealist cinema movement and was hailed as one of the world's great beauties.
Her reputation in that regard was cemented in 1955 when starred in the film La Donna Piu Bella del Mondo (The World's Most Beautiful Woman), which came shortly after her Hollywood breakout role in director John Huston's 1953 classic Beat the Devil.
Lollobrigida won a Golden Globe award for her performance opposite Rock Hudson in the 1961 romantic comedy Come September.
Long engaged in a rivalry with fellow Italian screen beauty Sophia Loren, Lollobrigida is credited with influencing the look of a generation of Italian women in the 1960s, especially her short hairstyle, and for decades was revered as an archetype of sultry Italian sex appeal.
I think I saw her as ‘Bernadette’ as a kid.
Great movie.
She remained good looking into old age:
In my experience Italian men are pretty hot, too.
“In a wonderful counterpoint, Italian men have the longest average penis length in Europe.”
Is that by actual measurement, or word of mouth?
Actual measurement.
Science! You can look it up. Or you can look at some Italians.
And by the way, if you walk a few tiny Italian mountain villages, especially during La Passigiata, “The Walking”, you will overdose on Sophias and Ginas.
It’s the best possible overdose, you may pass out but guess who will come running.
Funny. I JUST watched the original 1964 “The Pink Panther” this past weekend. Cardinale was HOT.
I was a sophomore in high school in Rochester, New York when the movie was released in 1963. One of the Rochester newspapers ran a contest to find a Liz Taylor look-alike. The guy I was dating at the time was an usher at the theater where the movie was premiering, and he got me in for free. The winner of the contest was there in a gold costume and headdress, similar to the one Liz wore on her entrance to Rome. Hard to believe it was so many years ago. I'm 75 now. Yikes!
I didn’t see it until about ten years later.
The movie actually inspired me to learn about Egypt of that time; and then the traveling King Tut exhibit did the same.
The movie was too ‘Hollywood’, and not enough ‘Egypt’ of it’s time...
But, again, it was fun.
Thank you.
Had to be the jabs! :-)
“Suddenly, and unexpectedly?”
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