Italian model and film actor, she left the cinema and joined the jet set
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.
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.
- 11/18/2009
- by John Francis Lane
- The Guardian - Film News
Rosanna Schiaffino, Vince Edwards in Carl Foreman’s The Victors (1963) Rosanna Schiaffino, the sensual leading lady of dozens of Italian (and a few international) productions of the ’60s and early ’70s, died on Oct. 17 at her home in Milan following a long battle with cancer. She was 69. The Genoa-born (Nov. 25, 1938) actress, referred to by some as the "Italian Hedy Lamarr," began her film career in the late 1950s. Among her best-known roles are those in Francesco Rosi’s first feature, La Sfida / The Challenge (1958); Mauro Bolognini’s La Notte brava / The Big Night / Bad Girls Don’t Cry (1959), winner of the Italian Film Critics’ Silver Ribbon for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s screenplay; and André Hunebelle’s historical [...]...
- 10/19/2009
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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