Gina Lollobrigida, film star who conquered Italy, Hollywood and the world, dies at 95
There she is, waving from the backseat of a convertible on the eve of the Cannes Film Festival. And here she is again, stepping to the tarmac from a jet in Paris, her scarf billowing perfectly in the evening breeze. And again, cloaked in emerald — dress and rings, both — in her villa outside Rome.
An actor, yes, but somehow Gina Lollobrigida was always more than just that.
As Italy was pulling itself from the rubble of World War II and the grinding oppression of fascism, Lollobrigida emerged as the face of la dolce vita, a siren beckoning Romans to once again indulge, celebrate and embrace.
“She represented something iconic, far more important than the actual talent she often displayed in her work as an actress,” wrote the late author Peter Bondanella in his book “Italian Cinema.”
Never out of the headlines for long and with a life captured in film and an endless burst of celebrity photographs — squeezed up next to Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol or David Bowie — Lollobrigida remained planted firmly in public view until her death Monday.
Forever beloved in her homeland, Lollobrigida died in Rome, the Italian news agency Lapresse said, quoting Tuscany Gov. Eugenio Giani. Lollobrigida was an honorary citizen of a Tuscan town.
Her agent, Paola Comin, also confirmed her death but did not give details, The Associated Press reported.
Lollobrigida had surgery in September for a broken thigh bone after a fall. She returned home and said she had quickly resumed walking.
Lollobrigida’s rise to stardom was rapid. She made movies in Europe and the U.S., signed a long-term Hollywood contract with Howard Hughes, starred
alongside Yul Brynner, Frank Sinatra and Rock Hudson, kept company with Salvador Dali, Fidel Castro and pioneering heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard, and had a running drama-fest with fellow countrywoman Sophia Loren, a rivalry so fierce one wondered whether there was enough oxygen in Italy for the two of them.
“I am fire. I’m a volcano. All the things I do, I do with passion, fire and strength,” she said in a 1994 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “That’s me.”
Born in Subiaco, Italy, in 1927 (though she sometimes claimed it was 1928), Lollobrigida was the second of four daughters of Giovanni and Giuseppina Lollobrigida. When Allied air attacks destroyed their home in the early days of World War II, the family fled to the urban core of Rome.
Lollobrigida said her childhood memories were of hunger, hardship and upheaval.
“I know what it is to be hungry. I know what it is to lose your home. I remember when I had fear,” she told The Associated Press in 1994. “I know what it is to grow up never having a toy.”
She was studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome when a talent agent spotted her and offered her a modeling and acting contract. When she was summoned to the Cinecitta studios, the hub of Italian cinema, she was offered 1,000 lire to sign.
“I told them my asking price was 1 million lire, thinking that would put a stop to the whole thing,” Lollobrigida told Vanity Fair in 2015. “But they said yes!”
Lollobrigida was cast in several movies filmed in Italy, including some for which she received no credit, before filming “Alina,” a melodrama in which Lollobrigida uses her beauty as her chief weapon in a dangerous smuggling operation. Among others, it caught the attention of Hughes, the eccentric businessman, aviator and maverick film tycoon.
Hughes quickly invited Lollobrigida to Hollywood for a screen test. Though she asked for two plane tickets so that her husband could accompany her, when her travel packet arrived in Rome, there was only one ticket.
Her husband, a physician named Milko Skofic, was less than pleased, but ultimately relented. “’He said, ‘Go. I don’t want you to say one day that I didn’t let you have a career.’ So I went alone.”
After 2 1/2 months of fending off his advances and tolerating his erratic behavior, Lollobrigida said she signed a seven-year contract just so that she could go home. The pact made it difficult and hugely expensive for any American movie studio — other than Hughes’ RKO Pictures — to hire Lollobrigida.
She never made a single movie for Hughes and said she was content to wait out the contract in Europe, where there was no shortage of work.