Alida Valli; Independent obituary
Hyfler/Rosner
Tom Vallance
25 April 2006
The Italian actress Alida Valli (billed simply as Valli in
her English-speaking films) made over 100 movies but will be
best remembered for her starring role in Carol Reed's The
Third Man (1949), one of the greatest of British films. As
Anna Schmidt, the Czech refugee and enigmatic sweetheart of
the racketeer Harry Lime in post-war Vienna, she gave a
chilling performance of a woman ultimately drained of
feeling or passion, and featured in one of the most famous
final scenes in cinema history.
After Lime's funeral, Anna is seen in the distance walking
towards the camera down a long lane in the cemetery. Waiting
to one side is Lime's former friend, Holly (Joseph Cotten),
who has fallen in love with her. Her face emotionless, Anna
continues walking straight past him with no acknowledgement
as, to the accompaniment of Anton Karas's zither music, the
film ends.
Valli made other notable films, including Luchino Visconti's
Senso and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem, and
for Alfred Hitchcock she played another enigmatic heroine,
the mysterious Mrs Paradine, accused of murdering her
wealthy husband in The Paradine Case, but Reed's masterpiece
was her finest hour.
Born Alida Maria Laura Altenburger in 1921 in Pola, Istria
(then in Italy but now a region of Croatia), she had an
Italian mother and a journalist father of Austrian descent.
She made her first feature film, Il Cappello a tre punte
(The Three-Cornered Hat, 1934), at the age of 13, after
training at Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia,
the film school set up by Benito Mussolini, and immediately
won admirers for her winning personality and dark-haired
beauty.
In 1939 she achieved stardom with the title role in Manon
Lescaut, co- starring Vittorio De Sica, and other films in
which she starred included Oltre l'amore ("Beyond Love",
1940) and Piccolo mondo antico (Old-fashioned World, 1941),
which won her the Best Actress Award at the Venice Film
Festival. She won further acclaim for her portrayal of a
Russian anti- Communist who flirts with a party official to
get medical treatment for her lover (Rosanno Brazzi) in Noi
vivi (We the Living, 1942). Based on a novel by Ayn Rand,
the film was quickly banned by the Fascists, who detected an
anti-totalitarian message, but in recent years it has been
recovered and favourably re-evaluated.
In 1944 Valli married the Surrealist painter and jazz
composer Oscar De Mejo, and they had two sons, Roberto and
Carlo. Valli had stopped appearing in films, refusing to
support works of Fascist propaganda - though her mother was
shot and wounded by anti-Fascists in 1945 for alleged
collaboration.
Valli had a great success in 1946 when she played the title
role in Eugenia Grandet, based on the novel by Balzac. The
film brought her to the attention of the producer David O.
Selznick, who signed her to a personal contract, and in 1947
Valli and her husband moved to the United States. Selznick
hoped to duplicate the success he had had with his former
protégée Ingrid Bergman, but Valli's first two Hollywood
films were not successful, though the first was directed by
Alfred Hitchcock.
The "master of suspense" had hoped to lure Greta Garbo out
of retirement to play the suspected murderess in The
Paradine Case (1948), but, when Garbo refused the part, he
borrowed Valli from Selznick. The actress had the glacial,
patrician qualities which the director favoured and which
suited the role, but the film was overlong, uninvolving and
not one of Hitchcock's best. It was much better, though,
than Valli's next movie, a lachrymose drama entitled The
Miracle of the Bells (1948), co-starring Fred MacMurray and
Frank Sinatra, in which she played a former chorus girl who
becomes a movie star and dies after the strain of playing
Joan of Arc on screen.
Valli then starred with Joseph Cotten in a mild film noir,
Walk Softly, Stranger, filmed in 1948 but not released until
two years later, after she had starred in The Third Man.
Produced by Alexander Korda and Selznick, who had both Valli
and Joseph Cotten under contract, The Third Man was written
by Graham Greene, whose original denouement was more
optimistic, but, when Selznick and Reed suggested a less
cosy ending, Greene was wholeheartedly in agreement. Welles,
who described Valli as "the sexiest thing you ever saw in
your life", wrote later that during filming he was hardly
aware of her because of another infatuation he had at the
time:
"I see The Third Man every two or three years - it is the
only movie of mine I watch on television because I like it
so much - and I look at Alida Valli and I say, "What was in
your mind when you were 10 days in Vienna and you didn't
make a move?" She drives me mad with lust when I see her in
it!"
After completing The Third Man, Valli returned to Hollywood
to make The White Tower (1950) with Glenn Ford and Claude
Rains, a mountaineering tale in which she played a young
woman determined to conquer the mountain that killed her
father. But the American public had failed to respond to her
significantly, and Selznick allowed her to break her
contract and return to Italy, where she was to be constantly
busy for virtually the rest of her life.
In Visconti's sumptuous Senso (a.k.a. Livia, 1953), a
melodramatic piece set in Venice during the Risorgimento and
styled like grand opera, she gave one of her finest
performances (which won her a Best Actress Award at the
Venice Film Festival) as a married noblewoman fighting for
the cause of independence and having an affair with an
Austrian officer (Farley Granger).
Valli's personal life was similarly dramatic - in her early
days there were rumours of an affair with Mussolini, and
during the Second World War she had fallen in love with a
fighter pilot whose family had forbidden him to marry her
and who was later killed in action. During her Hollywood
period she is alleged to have had brief affairs with Gregory
Peck and Carol Reed, and she herself confessed to an
unrequited passion for Sinatra.
In 1952 she divorced Mejo, and in 1954 her involvement in a
highly publicised sex, drugs and murder scandal almost
ruined her career. Pietro Piccione, the son of a former
foreign minister, was suspected of murdering a young girl
found dead on a beach near Rome, and Valli was the principal
witness for his defence, claiming that she and Piccione were
having an affair and that she had been with him at Carlo
Ponti's villa in Amalfi at the time of the girl's death. The
scandal, with its "dolce vita" aspects and suggestions of
society orgies, kept her off the screen for two years.
She turned to the stage, forming a theatre group with two
friends, and over the years she appeared in works by Ibsen,
Pirandello, Williams, Sartre, Miller and others. She resumed
her screen career with such notable films as the early
Michelangelo Antonioni drama Il Grido (The Cry, 1957) and
the chilling horror tale Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans
visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959), in which she is a
plastic surgeon's assistant, kidnapping and murdering
beautiful girls so that the surgeon can graft their skin on
to his disfigured daughter's face.
Valli herself did not age well, her features becoming hard
and grim, and many of her later films featured her as strict
or frustrated matrons. In Henri Colpi's poignant Une aussi
longue absence (The Long Absence, 1961), she gave a
beautifully understated portrayal of a café owner who meets
a tramp who may or may not be the husband who disappeared 15
years earlier. In Claude Chabrol's Ophélia (1962), a
modern-day variation on Hamlet, she was convincingly wracked
as the mother who after being widowed swiftly marries her
husband's brother. She was Merope in Pier Paolo Pasolini's
Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex, 1967), and in Bertolucci's Strategia
del ragno (The Spider's Stratagem, 1970), made for Italian
television but released theatrically in the UK and the US,
she was a mother concealing from her son that his father was
not a hero who fought the Fascists in 1936, but actually a
traitor. Time magazine called her performance "magnificently
strong".
She later played smaller parts in two more Bertolucci films,
1900 (1976) and La Luna (a.k.a. Luna, 1979). Occasionally
she returned to the US for roles on television, including a
three-episode story of Dr Kildare in which she played an old
sweetheart of Dr Gillespie (Raymond Massey).
Several of Valli's later films were exploitation films of
horror and fantasy, including House of Exorcism (1975), The
Antichrist (1976), Suor omicidi (The Killer Nun, 1979), and
two of Dario Argento's stylish but gory thrillers, Suspiria
(1976) and Inferno (1980). In 1995 she appeared in A Month
at the Lake with Vanessa Redgrave. Her last film was La
Sconosciuta ("The Unknown"), which she recently completed.
In 1997 Valli, who in her later years vehemently refused to
talk to journalists about The Third Man, was awarded a
Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival for life
achievement.
Alida Maria Laura Altenburger (Alida Valli), actress: born
Pola, Italy 31 May 1921; married 1944 Oscar De Mejo (died
1992; two sons; marriage dissolved 1952); died Rome 22 April
2006.