Gina Lollobrigida

"She made Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple"

- attributed to Humphrey Bogart

Gina Lollobrigida (July 4, 1927 – January 16, 2023) was an Italian actress, born in Subiaco, and active in films from the late 1940s through the early 1970s. After retiring from filmmaking, she took up a second career as an artist and a humanitarian activist. She ran (unsuccessfully) for the European Parliament in 1999. She's been overshadowed by Sophia Loren in public notice, but still has a considerable following.


 * Beauty Contest: Gina first came to significant public notice in 1947, when she entered the Miss Italy beauty pageant and won 3rd place. The first- and second-place winners were, respectively, Lucia Bose and Gianna Maria Canale, who also became actresses; in fact, the Miss Italy pageants in the late 1940s and early 1950s turned out to be a fertile field for the discovery of stars and starlets for the burgeoning Italian film industry.
 * Brainy Brunette: As detailed in the Renaissance Woman entry, Gina was multilingual and highly accomplished in many fields of the fine arts.
 * The Fifties: The period of Gina's greatest success as an actress, though her best-known American films (Come September and Strange Bedfellows) were made in the early 1960s.
 * Golden Age of Hollywood: A subversion, as Gina actually earned her fame in Italian cinema (her breakthrough role was in Bread, Love and Dreams in 1953) before beginning to get roles in American films in the late 1950s, when old Hollywood was beginning its transition to New Hollywood.
 * Keep Circulating the Tapes: A number of her movies, most notably La Donna Piu' Bella del Mondo (The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, a biopic of Edwardian Era opera diva Lina Cavalieri), have never been officially released in the United States on VHS or DVD.
 * Ms. Fanservice: Most of her movies during her time as an international star, especially La Donna 'Piu Bella Del Mondo (she has a lengthy Stocking Filler scene as a music-hall singer early on), Anna di Brooklyn (Fast and Sexy) (the most famous image from the movie shows her in a very skimpy one-piece black lace outfit), and Trapeze (arguably one of the main purposes of the movie is to show La Lollo in a revealing circus-performer costume).
 * Of Corsets Sexy: Her 1950s movie, La Donna 'Piu Bella Del Mondo (Beautiful But Dangerous) shows Gina snugly corseted in several scenes, most strikingly during a fencing duel with a professional rival.
 * Renaissance Woman: Gina was a skilled photographer (with several published folios to her credit), sculptor, painter and singer.
 * Soap Opera: Toward the end of her active career as an actress, Gina worked for a while on the U.S. nighttime soap Falcon Crest.
 * You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Gina turned her brown curls blue for her role as the Blue Fairy in Luigi Comenici's 1972 version of Pinocchio.