Lucia Bosè
Italian beauty who starred in noted 1950s films and married the philandering torero Luis Dominguin
LUCIA BOSÈ, who has died aged 89 after contracting Covid-19, was an actress and former Miss Italy who seemed destined for stardom in the 1950s after appearing in films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and Luis Buñuel; but she gave up her career for what was to prove a chastening marriage to Spain’s most famous bullfighter, Luis Miguel Dominguin.
Her screen potential was first spotted just after the war by Luchino Visconti. Aged 15, she was working in the Galli patisserie in Milan where the director of The Leopard would indulge his fondness for marrons glacés.
He told her that she had a face for cinema. The following year, she was invited to take part in the second Miss Italia competition after a friend had sent a magazine a photograph of her. Her youthful spiritedness and blossoming figure embodied the feeling of renewal abroad in Italy and she was awarded the prize ahead of two other future actresses, Gina Lollobrigida and Silvana Mangano.
Visconti wrote to say that he had been right and offered to host her in his villa on the Via Salaria if she moved to Rome, where the neo-realist film movement was gaining acclaim. Lucia Bosè was cast in one of its first significant productions, Bitter Rice (1949). But her disapproving parents managed to prevent her from signing up as she was not yet of age and the part went to Silvana Mangano.
For the next six years she suffered from a collapsed lung which frustrated Visconti’s hopes of working with her in the theatre. But he was able to persuade film directors to take her on. She made her debut in Giuseppe De Santis’s follow-up to Bitter Rice, the rural drama No Peace under the Olive Tree (1950), in which this time she stood in for a pregnant Silvana Mangano.
She made more of a mark as a femme fatale in Antonioni’s noirish Story of a Love Affair (1950), based on The Postman Always Rings Twice. Her exquisite beauty held its own with the director’s then-experimental flourishes and depiction of interior emotion. Pablo Picasso, a friend of her future husband, remarked correctly that hers was a face able to play many types of woman, from aristocrat to working-class, where her roots lay.
After starring again for Antonioni in The Lady Without Camelias, she featured as another woman dealing with unforeseen consequences of an affair in Death of a Cyclist (1955), Juan Antonio Bardem. This led to the offer of the lead in Buñuel’s morality study, This is Called Dawn (1956).
By then she had met Dominguin, who had recently retired. Lucia Bosè, whose previous boyfriend had been the actor Walter Chiari, at first had no idea of the Spaniard’s fame or of his reputation as an insatiable Don Juan.
Dominguin once described the allure of bullfighting: “It is like being with the woman who pleases you most in the world when her husband comes in with a pistol. The bull is the woman, the husband and the pistol, all in one. No other life … can give you all that.”
His many conquests included Lana Turner and Ava Gardner (married to Frank Sinatra): after they had first slept together, she asked why he was getting dressed. “I’m off to tell everyone!” he replied. Another lover, the actress Miroslava Sternova, was reputed to have killed herself on hearing that he had married her Italian rival.
The virginal Lucia Bosè then knew little of the ways of men, and subsequently observed that their romance owed much to her fear of not finding a husband – and to not speaking each other’s language.
“When I began to understand who he was, and he who I was, then the crisis began,” she noted. By then they had married – first in Las Vegas in 1955 and then, when she fell pregnant, in a religious ceremony in Spain. Over a decade she gave birth to a son and two daughters. Another child lived only briefly and she had four miscarriages.
Superficially, she enjoyed a glamorous life of parties at the couple’s villa outside Madrid and hunting at their ranch in Andalusia. Besides Picasso, her husband’s friends included Ernest Hemingway.
When Dominguin returned to the bulls in 1959, the writer described his rivalry with the torero’s own brotherin-law, Antonio Ordoñez, in what became The Dangerous Summer (1985). Lucia Bosè was never accepted, however, by Dominguin’s family and soon learnt that she was expected to turn a blind eye to his very public and continual infidelity. “He betrayed me with famous women” – his admirers included Lauren Bacall – “and with all my friends,” she recalled. “I had to keep seeing them and pretend I knew nothing.”
Punning on the cuckold’s symbol, she joked that “when it came to horns, it was I who won a gold medal.” The final straw proved to be when Dominguin took up with a young relation who was staying with them. After separating, he and Lucia Bosè divorced in 1968. She remained in Spain for the sake of her children – but found every door in the village where they lived now barred to her.
She was born into humble circumstances as Lucia Borloni in Milan on January 28 1931. Her family’s farmhouse was destroyed by Allied bombs during the war and at its end she saw the suspended bodies of Mussolini and his lover Clara Petacci. Aged 12, she began work as a drudge in a lawyer’s office.
After her divorce, in Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) she made her first appearance on the screen since she and Dominguin had had cameos in Testament of Orpheus, by Jean Cocteau, a decade before. Her later films included the Taviani brothers’ Under the Sign of Scorpio (1969) and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1987), with Rupert Everett.
She became best known in Spain, however, as a symbol of independent, even unconventional womanhood – she dyed her hair a vivid blue in old age – in a nation where chauvinism was being challenged. In 2000 she opened a museum devoted to depictions of angels near her home in Segovia.
Her fame was only increased by that of her son Miguel, who became a celebrated singer and heart-throb in Italy and Latin America; latterly, he has proclaimed his “tri-sexuality”.
Lucia Bosè was appointed a dame in Spain’s Order of Merit in 2018. She claimed to have forgotten her life in the cinema, perhaps “because it was directed by others”.
“My private life is what I remember well, because it was directed by me.” Dominguin died in 1996 and she never remarried.
Her son and two daughters survive her.