Gina Lollobrigida life and biography

Gina Lollobrigida is an Italian actress, photojournalist and sculptress. Gina was considered also a sex symbol of the 1950s.

Gina Lollobrigida was a wildly popular Italian actress and sex symbol of the 1950s and '60s. She was born into a working-class family, and raised in an unpretentious suburb of Rome. She was discovered, legend has it, by a stranger on the street, who offered her work as an extra in films.

Her first film was 1946's Aquila nera (The Black Eagle) with Rossano Brazzi, and her first leading role was in the opera Pagliacci, with Lollobrigida's singing dubbed. Her first major success as a star was in Miss Italia, a backstage drama set at a beauty contest and released in America as My Beautiful Daughter. She was an international sensation after the swashbuckling comedy Fanfan la Tulipe (Fan-Fan the Tulip). When she starred in La Donna più Bella del Mondo (The World's Most Beautiful Woman) in 1956, the title was perfectly plausible.

Lollobrigida was lured across the Atlantic to star in several English-language films. She came between high-flying Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in the circus melodrama Trapeze, lured Yul Brynner and came to God in the Biblical epic Solomon and Sheba, and she was Rock Hudson's never-contented mistress in the lightweight comedy Come September. She was at her best as Humphrey Bogart's wife in the odd but endearing noiresque comedy Beat the Devil.

She retired from acting in the mid-1970s, but has occasionally returned to the camera when the price was right, even taking a regular role in the prime time soap opera Falcon Crest in the mid-1980s. She has used her celebrity to sell cosmetics, published several books of her photography, and created sculptures which have been displayed without snickering in museums. In the mid-1970s she financed and directed Ritratto di Fidel (Portrait of Fidel), a documentary about Fidel Castro that included a rare interview with the Cuban dictator, fueling persistent rumors that a romance was sparked. In 1999 she ran for a seat in the European Union Parliament, stressing humanitarian issues, but lost the election.

Today, she remains an active supporter of Italian and Italian American causes, particularly the National Italian American Foundation (NIAF). In 2008, she received the NIAF Lifetime Achievement Award at the Foundation's Anniversary Gala.

FILMS:

A Hundred and One Nights of Simon Cinema (25-Jan-1995)
Deceptions (27-May-1985)
King, Queen, Knave (8-Jun-1972)
Bad Man's River (11-Feb-1972)
Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell (Dec-1968)
The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell (8-May-1968)
The Young Rebel (3-Nov-1967)
Hotel Paradiso (14-Oct-1966)
Strange Bedfellows (10-Feb-1965)
The Dolls (27-Jan-1965)
Woman of Straw (27-Aug-1964)
Imperial Venus (1963)
Come September (9-Aug-1961)
Go Naked in the World (10-Mar-1961)
Solomon and Sheba (24-Dec-1959)
Never So Few (7-Dec-1959)
Where the Hot Wind Blows (25-Jan-1959)
Fast and Sexy (19-Apr-1958)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (19-Dec-1956)
Trapeze (30-May-1956)
Beautiful But Dangerous (21-Oct-1955)
Woman of Rome (27-Oct-1954)
Crossed Swords (28-Jul-1954)
Bread, Love and Dreams (22-Dec-1953)
Beat the Devil (24-Nov-1953)
The Unfaithfuls (23-Jan-1953)
Beauties of the Night (Sep-1952)
Fan-Fan the Tulip (21-Mar-1952)

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