Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, who burst onto the post-war Hollywood screen, has died at the age of 95, the Italian Minister of Culture announced on Monday January 16. The former sex symbol, who in 1952 first starred in Fanfan la tulipe, by French director Christian-Jaque, had fractured her femur when she fell at her Roman home in September and had to be operated on. "Farewell to a diva of the big screen, protagonist of more than half a century of Italian cinema history. Her charm is eternal. Ciao Lollo," tweeted the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano.
Born on July 4, 1927 in the small village of Subiaco, in the heart of Abruzzo (central Italy), in a modest family which then settled in Rome, Gina Lollobrigida played alongside the greatest actors of her time in the 1950s and 1960s, from Frank Sinatra to Sean Connery, from Marcello Mastroianni to Humphrey Bogart. She starred in leading roles in Beauties of the Night, by René Clair (1952), Woman of Rome, by Luigi Zampa (1954), The Hunchback of Notre Dame, by Jean Delannoy (1956), Bread, Love and Dreams then Frisky, by Luigi Comencini (1953 and 1954), Flesh and the Woman, by Robert Siodmak (1954).
She toured until 1962 in the United States and then ended up returning to Italy. She then appeared only occasionally in film and television. "La Lollo" then returned to her first artistic loves, photography and then sculpture, to which she devoted herself entirely from the beginning of the 1980s.