The Italian Audrey Hepburn
Elsa Martinelli, actress: b Grosseto, Tuscany, January 30, 1935; m (1) Count Franco Mancinelli Scotti, (2) Willy Rizzo; d July 8, 2017, aged 82.
Elsa Martinelli may never have been a fully fledged film star – at least not in Hollywood, whatever her success in her native Italy – but she was always a diva.
She was sometimes called an Italian Audrey Hepburn, yet although the women were friends they were very different. Uncompromising, spirited and idiosyncratic, Martinelli rarely had to settle for less than she wanted, which was to live life on her own terms.
With that came the admiration and often adoration of men. She had a brief, intense romance with Frank Sinatra, married an aristocrat and a jet-set photographer, was on easy terms with John F Kennedy and tickled the tummy of the ageing Aristotle Onassis. Gary Cooper drank champagne from her slipper.
Born in Grosseto, Tuscany, in 1935, as Elisa Tia, she was the seventh of eight children of a railway attendant. When she was nine the family moved to Rome. She left school at 11 and began work sewing pearls on to ladies’ hats. By the time she was 14 she was a waitress.
One lunchtime, when she was 18, she went to try on a bias-cut skirt that she could not afford in the shop of Roberto Capucci, then regarded as the best young Roman designer. He took one look at her and made her his house model.
The post-war feminine shape celebrated in Italy was that which Sophia Loren attributed to the power of pasta. By contrast, Martinelli was slim, tall at 175 centimetres, long-limbed and angular of cheekbone. Her features anticipated by a decade the look of the 1960s.
Within a year she was a successful model in New York. Then Kirk Douglas, who had set up a production company, saw her picture on a magazine cover. His wife thought Martinelli would be perfect for a part in his next film, The Indian Fighter (1955). He got her number from her beau of the time, the designer Oleg Cassini, but Martinelli thought when he rang that it was a hoax. To confirm it was Douglas, she made him perform down the line A Whale of a Tale, the song he had sung in 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.
By then she had appeared in a handful of minor roles in European cinema, such as Rouge et Noir, and that was to become her principal stage. This was in part because of her apparent disdain for the Hollywood system and her dislike of Los Angeles.
But she had talent and despite her limited education was no featherhead. Her father had read to her from Shaw and could recite Dante from memory.
She went on to have parts in more than 50 films, including Hatari! (1962) with John Wayne, in which, memorably, she washes a baby elephant.
She was also in Guy Hamilton’s forgotten stowaway drama Manuela opposite Trevor Howard, The Trial (Kafka directed by Orson Welles), the Tsarist drama Prisoner of the Volga (with John Derek and Gert Frobe) and the Burton-Taylor vehicle The VIPs.
Her big success at home was Donatella (1956), a Sabrina-like story of a poor girl’s life transformed. It won her the Silver Bear in Berlin, although filming was marred by her father being fatally run over by a bus while riding a moped she had given him.
Having been pursued by Charlie Chaplin’s son Syd, she was then linked to Italian leading men Rossano Brazzi and Walter Chiari, who later squired Ava Gardner. In 1957, however, aged 22, Martinelli married Count Franco Mancinelli Scotti. The marriage was quite against his mother’s wishes. It was reported that she had closed the doors of the family palazzo to her son and sacked him as the estate manager.
Besides Martinelli’s humble origins, this may have had something to do with her recently having collected three suspended prison sentences of six months each for shouting at traffic policemen who had had the temerity to give her a ticket.
In 1960, Martinelli and her husband separated. In her memoir, Sono come sono (I am what I am, 1995), she blamed his roving eye for the end of their marriage, although this was complicated by divorce not then being available to Italians.
In the early 1960s she appeared in Roger Vadim’s lesbian vampire shocker Blood and Roses and, in 1965, with Marcello Mastroianni in La decima vittima (The 10th Victim), Elio Petri’s proto-Hunger Games film. Thereafter her career wound down in the usual welter of tosh, one of her last parts being in a 1979 episode of The Return of the Saint, with Ian Ogilvy as the hero with the halo.
Nevertheless, she was still famous enough in Italy in 1973 to be the target of a letterbomb, with Laura Antonelli and the German pin-up Solvi Stubing (who also died this month). Luckily, hers went off en route at Pisa station.
By then she had been living for more than a decade with the photographer Willy Rizzo. They married in 1968 and made Paris their base, where for a time she was a muse to Madame Chanel and Pierre Cardin.
Later they partied with Dalida and Sacha Distel and the like. Maria Callas insisted she cook her risotto, and she became a favourite with Aristotle Onassis. A photograph of Martinelli and Onassis together is said to have sent Jackie Onassis running for a facelift.
After the end of her marriage to Rizzo in 1979, Martinelli returned to Rome and set up as an interior decorator. At almost 70 she spoke proudly of still enjoying her sex life, and that year had her final role, in the television costume drama Orgoglio. She was cast as a duchess. ‘‘And looking like this,’’ she quipped, ‘‘what else could I play? A nun?’’ – The Times