Gina Lollobrigida

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.”

Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, one of the biggest stars of European cinema in the 1950s and '60s, has died at the age of 95.

Her life story was as exotic as any of the roles she played. And the maxim by which she lived, she said, was simple: "We are all born to die. She remained active in politics - as recently as last year, she stood for the Italian Senate, but was unsuccessful. "My experience," she said, "has been that, when I have found the right person, he has run away from me. His lawyers pursued her as far as the Algerian desert - where she was making a film. She disliked Sinatra, with whom she starred in Never So Few - a wartime romance shot in Myanmar and Thailand. One version of the story says Power died in Lollobrigida's car on the way to hospital. She realised her celebrity was global when 60,000 turned up to greet her in Argentina. Prince Rainier of Monaco was one, in spite of his marriage to Grace Kelly. "I signed it because I wanted to go home," she said. Although the behaviour was clearly abusive, Lollobrigida said she enjoyed the attention. To avoid the press, they often ate at cheap restaurants or in the back of his car.

Actress dubbed 'the most beautiful woman in the world' has died in Rome.

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. In 1974, Fidel Castro hosted her as a guest in Cuba for 12 days as she worked on a photo reportage. 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.

Film actor of the 1950s and 60s who went from early Italian roles to become an international star.

In 2011 she was a guest artist in a film directed by an Italian TV comedian, Ezio Greggio, called Box Office 3D, about the excesses of American cinema. In 1972 she was much appreciated in a rare TV appearance as the Blue Fairy in an adaptation of Pinocchio for Italian television by Comencini. Comencini directed Lollobrigida again as La Bersagliera in Bread, Love and Jealousy, a sequel that was as successful as the first film, but both she and Comencini declined to make a third film, and Loren eagerly took her place. In Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell (1968), she played on her early peasant image, as an Italian woman who convinces each of three former American GIs (Phil Silvers, Peter Lawford and Telly Savalas) that he is the father of her daughter, and won best actress at the David di Donatello awards for her performance. The movie that launched her as a sex symbol was Altri Tempi (Infidelity, 1952), an anthology film directed by Alessandro Blasetti, in which Vittorio De Sica was the lawyer who defends the honour of a woman (Lollobrigida) accused of being too sexy. Her character La Bersagliera’s sincere love for the shy but honest young cop in preference to the extrovert sergeant major played with panache by De Sica made her popular with audiences everywhere, and a pin-up around the world, although the film was panned by most critics.

The actress was dubbed "the most beautiful woman in the world" after the title of one of her films.

With lush eyelashes and thick, brown curls framing her face, Lollobrigida started a hairstyle rage in the 1950s known as the poodle cut. Producer Mario Costa plucked her from the streets of Rome to appear on the big screen. In 1974, Fidel Castro hosted her as a guest in Cuba for 12 days as she worked on a photo reportage. 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.

According to Italian news agency Lapresse, Lollobrigida died in a clinic in Rome. No cause of death has been cited. In September she had had surgery to repair a ...

She won the Berlinale Camera at the Berlin Film Festival in 1986, a special prize for outstanding contribution to world cinema at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in 1995 and the career award at the Rome Festival in 2008. Modelling work in her youth let to participation in a series of beauty contests, and she placed third in the Miss Italia pageant in 1947. Her first American movie, shot in Italy, was John Huston’s 1953 film noir spoof “Beat the Devil,” in which she starred with Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones. In 1961 she won the Golden Globes’ Henrietta Award for world film favorite — female. In September she had had surgery to repair a thigh bone broken in a fall, but she recovered and competed for a Senate seat in Italy’s elections held last year in September, though she did not win. [Gina Lollobrigida](https://variety.com/t/gina-lollobrigida/), the 1950s Italian bombshell who starred in films including “Fanfan la Tulipe,” “Beat the Devil,” “Trapeze” and “Buona Sera, Mrs.