Sandra Milo, a star of Fellini films, at 90
ROME — Sandra Milo, who was best known internationally for her roles in Federico Fellini’s movies “8 1/2” and “Juliet of the Spirits” — and whose tumultuous love life churned headlines in Italy — died Monday at her home in Rome. She was 90.
Her children announced the death on her official Facebook page. No cause was given.
Ms. Milo’s screen debut, alongside comic actor Alberto Sordi in “Lo Scapolo” (“The Bachelor”) in 1955, coincided with the golden age of Italian cinema. She went on to work alongside some of Italy’s most famous leading men, including Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman, and Vittorio De Sica, and for some of the country’s most renowned directors, including Roberto Rossellini, Dino Risi, and later Pupi Avati and Gabriele Salvatores.
But her primary claim to stardom was the two films she made with Fellini, with whom, she claimed in a 1982 book, “Caro Federico,” she had an off-screen romance that lasted nearly two decades. Fellini, who died in 1993, never spoke publicly about that claim. The Italian media called her Fellini’s muse.
Fellini, who fondly called Ms. Milo “Sandrocchia,” had also wanted her to play the role of the glamorous Gradisca in his semiautobiographical 1973 film, “Amarcord,” but, she told interviewers, her husband at the time had objected because he knew she was fond of Fellini.
“He knew I loved him,” she said in a 2019 documentary about her life.
She also said she knew that the production would take her away from her children. “Am I first a woman, or first a mother?” she mused in the documentary. “Maybe I am first a mother, so I didn’t do it.”
With a distinctive voice that often broke into laughter, Ms. Milo cultivated an image as a ditsy blond, impeccably coifed and made up. But family members, friends, and colleagues this week recalled her keen intelligence and warmth.
“My mother was first of all a mother, a free woman, and very smart,” her daughter Debora Ergas told reporters Tuesday at a public viewing in City Hall in Rome.
Ms. Milo had three children by two partners, and her private life was often fodder for tabloids and glossy magazines. With gaps of varying lengths — including a lull that began in the late 1960s when she raised her children — she worked until her death, most recently on reality television shows.
At 77, she participated in the Italian edition of “Celebrity Island,” in which low-buzz celebrities are plunked into a wild habitat to fend off nature; she was eliminated in the semifinal round. Last year, she was a contestant on the Italian edition of “The Masked Singer” and participated in the second season of an Italian reality program tracking the adventures of three so-called golden girls (average age: 80).
Sandra Milo was born Salvatrice Elena Greco in Tunis, Tunisia, on March 11, 1933. She moved with her family to the Tuscany region of Italy as a toddler and recalled experiencing fear and hunger during World War II.
Her mother called her “Lily,” she said in the 2019 documentary, but she didn’t like it. “It felt too light,” she said, and it did not reflect who she was. She chose the name Sandra, she explained, because the first syllable, “san,” is soft “like a caress,” she said, while the second, “dra,” “is very harsh, very dry, and resembles me because I am that too.”
She chose the last name Milo after a photoshoot she had done in a town outside Rome was published with the caption “The Milo of Tivoli,” a reference to the “Venus de Milo,” she said in an interview.
After a marriage at 15 that lasted only 21 days, she moved to Milan to model and then to Rome to act. She found work and got her big break in 1959 when she acted in Rossellini’s “Il Generale Della Rovere,” a critical and box office success. Two years later, she worked with him again on the drama “Vanina Vanini,” but that movie flopped so badly, and her performance was so viciously panned, that it nearly derailed her career.
She met Fellini on a beach near Rome, and he cast her as Carla, the lover of the director played by Mastroianni, in “8 1/2,” which won the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1964. She won the Silver Ribbon, a prestigious award given by Italian film journalists, for that performance, and again two years later for “Juliet of the Spirits,” in which she played the freespirited next-door neighbor of the protagonist, played by Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina.
In recent years, Ms. Milo was a frequent guest on talk shows and had supporting parts onscreen. She had a small recurring role on “Gigolo per Caso” (“Gigolo by Chance”), an Amazon series that aired in December.
When the pandemic began, she began posting feel-good videos and photos on Instagram, sometimes dressed as a goodnews fortuneteller. In March 2020, she chained herself in front of Palazzo Chigi, the seat of the Italian government, demanding to see Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, to raise awareness about the difficulties faced by workers in the arts and entertainment industry during the pandemic.
In 2021, she received a David di Donatello award, Italy’s equivalent of the Oscar, for career achievement. “It’s never too late to get an award,” she told the audience at the ceremony.
Her older daughter, Debora Ergas, was the product of her 11year relationship with Greekborn producer Moris Ergas. Her son, Ciro De Lollis, and her daughter Azzurra De Lollis are from her marriage to Ottavio De Lollis. In addition to her children, she leaves a grandson.
In 1990, Ms. Milo caused a media frenzy by marrying Jorge Ordoñez, a younger man she had met during a vacation in Cuba, but the marriage didn’t last long. In an interview with the Rome newspaper Il Messaggero, the photographer who had accompanied Ms. Milo to Cuba revealed that the marriage had been doomed because Ordoñez was already married, with two children. Some wondered whether it had been a stunt.
She was often asked about her two-year relationship, which was clandestine at the time, with Bettino Craxi, the leader of the Italian Socialist Party (which she supported), who died in 2000. But she insisted in interviews that Fellini had been her only true love.
“The cinema sometimes acclaimed her, and sometimes forgot her,” her daughter Debora told reporters. “But we know that she only spread love and generosity.”