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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Italian actress Virna Lisi dies at 78

The Columbian
Published:

Virna Lisi, a multifaceted Italian actress who found herself hostage to the sultry looks that sparked her career and quit Hollywood in the 1960s after being typecast in bombshell roles, died Dec. 18 in Rome. She was 78.

The cause was cancer, according to Italian media reports.

A star of Italian cinema by age 20, Lisi drew international attention for her lissome appeal in a range of dramas and farces. She dyed her naturally brunette hair blond, and the presence of a mole near her lips made her resemble a more exotic Marilyn Monroe.

On the Italian screen, Lisi had been presented as chic and elegantly sensual, but she was rebranded for American audiences as a skin-baring temptress.

That quality was put to immediate use in her Hollywood debut, the 1965 comedy “How to Murder Your Wife.” The film starred Jack Lemmon as a cartoonist who impulsively weds Lisi after she emerges from a birthday cake in a bikini. His initial lust gives way to regret the morning after.

The role, like her subsequent Hollywood films, played up her physical charms and minimized dialogue because of her limited command of English.

In 1966, she supported Frank Sinatra in the action film “Assault on a Queen” and then played an Italian nurse — again in a bikini — in the tepid comedy “Not With My Wife, You Don’t!” opposite Tony Curtis and George C. Scott.

Her ambitions toward more dramatic work went unfulfilled, at least in Hollywood. Back in Italy, Lisi won a starring role in the well-received Italian comedy “The Birds, the Bees and the Italians” (1966) and gradually found meatier parts in a career that spanned more than 100 films and TV shows.

Her most acclaimed performance was in “Queen Margot” (1994) as the politically scheming Catherine de’ Medici.

She won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival and earned the Cesar — the French equivalent of the Oscar — for best supporting actress.

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