Rosanna Schiaffino; Italian model and film actor
Hyfler/Rosner
Italian model and film actor, she left the cinema and joined
the jet set
a.. John Francis Lane
b..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/nov/17/rosanna-schiaffino-obituary
Schiaffino was launched as the 'Italian Hedy Lamarr'.
Photograph: Pierluigi Praturlon/Rex Features
Rosanna Schiaffino, who has died aged 69, was one of those
Italian beauty queens who began a promising acting career in
the post-neorealist cinema of the 1950s. She gave up the
cinema in the 1970s and married the handsome playboy and
steel industry heir Giorgio Falck. Their marriage and, a
decade later, their break-up and divorce, had overtones of
melodrama more piquant than the content of any of the 45
films in which Schiaffino had starred.
She was born in Genoa, in north Italy, into a well-off
family and, although her father wanted her to pursue studies
as a surveyor, her mother encouraged her showbusiness
ambitions, helping her to study privately at a drama school
and then to take part in beauty contests, which she usually
won. These led to modelling jobs, with photographs in
important magazines, including Life.
At the age of 27, she was offered her first film roles,
which brought her to the notice of the producer Franco
Cristaldi, who launched many of the stars and directors of
that era. He paired her with Marcello Mastroianni in Un
Ettaro di Cielo (A Hectare of Heaven, 1959), shown at the
Brussels and Edinburgh festivals. More significant was her
second film for him, La Sfida (The Challenge), directed by
Francesco Rosi, which was well received at the 1958 Venice
festival, where Schiaffino was much admired for her powerful
but sensitive performance as a Neapolitan girl, inspired by
a real-life character. On the day of her wedding to the
young man with whom she has been having a passionate affair
(the part was played by the Spanish actor Jos� Suarez), he
is killed by the Camorra, which he has been trying,
ingenuously, to outwit for control of the fruit market.
In 1959, she starred in Mauro Bolognini's La Notte Brava,
one of the first films co-scripted by Pier Paolo Pasolini,
who was not too happy about the casting of French actors
such as Laurent Terzieff and Jean-Claude Brialy to play his
Roman toughies, but approved of the choice of the actresses,
Elsa Martinelli and Schiaffino. In 1962 she appeared in
Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town. But though
the publicists had tried to launch Schiaffino as an "Italian
Hedy Lamarr", she was unlucky. She would have been more
appropiately heralded as the new Italian sex goddess after
Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren, but in the early 1960s
that role was passing to Claudia Cardinale, who would later
marry Cristaldi, with whom Schiaffino still had a contract.
Indeed, in 1960 Schiaffino was to have played Paolina
Borghese in a new Abel Gance film about Napoleon, but
Cristaldi, who was co-producer, secured the role for
Cardinale.
Schiaffino found another producer interested in her career,
Alfredo Bini, whom she would marry. In Bini's 1963
production RoGoPaG (named after its four directors, Roberto
Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pasolini and Ugo Gregoretti),
although Pasolini's episode La Ricotta would be most
remembered, Schiaffino showed her mettle in Rossellini's
Illibatezza (Chastity). She gave credibility and humour to
the role of an air hostess who succeeds in shaking off the
advances of an American PR guy looking for the perfect
chaste girl for an advertising campaign, by turning herself
into a vampish glamourpuss.
A more explicitly erotic role for her was that of Lucrezia,
the heroine of one of the most salacious plays of
Renaissance theatre, Niccol� Machiavelli's masterpiece La
Mandragola (The Mandrake), banned for centuries by the
Vatican, which Alberto Lattuada adapted into an over-the-top
Italian comedy in 1965, with the comedian Tot�, with whom
Rosanna had played in an earlier film, as the cunning priest
who convinces her to accept an artful stratagem for
cuckolding her husband. Schiaffino won the only acting
honour of her career for this performance.
In 1966 she played a lead role in two international
productions set up by Bini, neither of which would give
lustre to their careers. One was a biopic, El Greco, filmed
in Toledo with Mel Ferrer in the title role, made by a
director, Luciano Salce, who was more at home with satirical
comedy. The other was an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The
Rover, directed by Terence Young, in which Schiaffino
co-starred with Anthony Quinn and Rita Hayworth.
After another 15 films, none of them particularly notable,
in 1976 she decided to give up the cinema and divorced Bini,
with whom she had had a daughter. She began a new life with
the jet set, and during the summer of 1980, in Portofino,
met Falck, who had also just divorced. Their affair was big
news for the gossip columnists. In 1981 she gave birth to
their son, Guido, and in 1982 they were married in Milan's
city hall by the mayor. Their marriage and its gradual
decline after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer in
1991, and the subsequent divorce, led to unpleasant
recriminations on both sides over the custody of their son
and the inheritance, but they came to an agreement before
Falck died in 2004.
Schiaffino is survived by her daughter, Antonella, and her
son.
. Rosanna Schiaffino, actor, born 29 November 1939; died 17
October 2009
Matthew Kruk
been removed.
http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Rosanna_Schiaffino