Small Romanian collectors card.
Seductive Italian actress
Virna Lisi (1936-2014) appeared in more than 100 film and TV productions and was internationally best known as a tempting blue-eyed blonde in Hollywood productions of the 1960s. But she proved to be more than a pretty face. Later she had a career Renaissance with three-dimensional character parts in a wide variety of Italian and French. A triumph was her portrayal of a malevolent Catherine de Medici in
La Reine Margot (1994) for which she won both the David di Donatello and the César awards.
Virna Lisi was born as Virna Lisa Pieralisi in Ancona, Italy in 1936. Her brother, Ubaldo, later became a talent agent. Her sister was actress Esperia Pieralisi. Virna began her film career as a teenager. She was discovered by two Neapolitan producers (Antonio Ferrigno and Ettore Pesce) in Paris. Her debut was in La corda d'acciaio/The line of steel (Carlo Borghesio, 1953-1958). Initially, she did musical films, like in E Napoli canta/Napoli sings (Armando Grottini, 1953) and the successful four-episode film Questa è la vita/Such is life (Luigi Zampa a.o., 1954), with the popular Totò. Her looks were more valued than her talent in some of her early films, like in Le diciottenni/Eighteen Year Olds (Mario Mattoli, 1955) with Marisa Allasio, and Lo scapolo/The Bachelor (Antonio Pietrangeli, 1955) with Alberto Sordi. She incarnated more demanding roles in Il cardinale Lambertini/Cardinal Lambertini (Giorgio Pastina, 1954) opposite Gino Cervi, La Donna del Giorno/The Doll That Took the Town (Francesco Maselli, 1956), the Peplum Romolo e Remo/Duel of the Titans (Sergio Corbucci, 1961) featuring musclemen Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott as the two legendary brothers, and Eva/Eve (Joseph Losey, 1962) starring Jeanne Moreau. In the late 1950s, Lisi played on stage at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, and appeared in I giacobini by Federico Zardi, under the direction of Giorgio Strehler. During the 1960s, Lisi played in stage comedies and she also participated in some very popular dramatic television productions. On TV, she also promoted a toothpaste brand, with a slogan which would become a catchphrase amongst the Italians: "con quella bocca può dire ciò che vuole" (with such a mouth, she can say whatever she wants).
In the 1960s, Hollywood producers were looking for a successor to Marilyn Monroe and so Virna Lisi made a dent in Hollywood comedies as a tempting blue-eyed blonde. She first starred opposite Jack Lemmon in George Axelrod’s satirical How to Murder Your Wife (Richard Quine, 1965). At IMDb, reviewer Mdantonio takes his hat off for her performance: “What most everyone fails to mention in the comments is the incredible skill of Virna Lisi. She is a natural mixing it up with Lemmon, (Claire) Trevor and the other veterans like she had been making movies for years. I have watched many movies in my day and I must say that Virna Lisi is right at the top, not only in beauty and sexuality but in carrying her role as good as anyone else could have. Ms. Lisi, my hat is off to you.” She also gained attention with the March 1965 cover of Esquire magazine on which she was shaving her face. The following year she appeared in another comedy, Not with My Wife, You Don't! (Norman Panama, 1966), now with Tony Curtis. She also starred with Frank Sinatra in Assault on a Queen (Jack Donohue. 1966), with Rod Steiger in La Ragazza e il Generale/The Girl and the General (Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1967), and twice with Anthony Quinn, in the war drama La vingt-cinquième heure/The 25th Hour (Henri Verneuil, 1967), and in The Secret of Santa Vittoria (Stanley Kramer, 1969). To overcome her typecasting as a sexy, seductive woman, Lisi sought new types of roles, and found these in such Italian comedies as Le bambole/Four Kinds of Love (Dino Risi a.o., 1965), Signore & signori/The Birds, the Bees and the Italians (Pietro Germi, 1966) and Le dolci signore/Anyone Can Play (Luigi Zampa, 1968), and Roma bene (Carlo Lizzani, 1971) with Senta Berger. At AllMovie, Robert Firsching reviews Signore & signori: “Pietro Germi's funny anthology combines the standard sex comedy format with some unexpectedly subtle observations about village life. The film centers on three stories exposing the sexual secrets of the Italian town of Treviso. (...) Signore e Signori won the Best Film award at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival.”
In the early 1970s, Virna Lisi decided to focus on her family, husband Franco Pesci and her son Corrado, born in 1962. In the later 1970s she had a career renaissance with a series of major Italian films, including the Nietzsche biography Al di là del bene e del male/Beyond Good and Evil (Liliana Cavani, 1977) starring Dominique Sanda, Ernesto (Salvatore Samperi, 1979), La cicala/The Cricket (Alberto Lattuada, 1980), and I ragazzi di via Panisperna/The Boys of the Via Panisperna (Gianni Amelio, 1989) with Andrea Prodan and Mario Adorf. Prodan’s brother Luca is the singer of an Argentinean band, which later made a song for Lisi. A Brazilian rock band, Virna Lisi, is even named after her. Her greatest triumph was the French film La Reine Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1994) in which Lisi played a malevolent Catherine de Medici, ordering assaults, poisonings, and instigations to incest. Karl Williams writes at AllMovie about the film: “The historical novel by Alexandre Dumas was adapted for the screen with this lavish French epic, winner of 5 Césars and a pair of awards at the Cannes Film Festival. Isabelle Adjani stars as Marguerite de Valois, better known as Margot, daughter of scheming Catholic power player Catherine de Medici (Virna Lisi).” For her magnificent portrayal Lisi won not only the César and Best Actress award in Cannes, but also the David di Donatello award, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar. From the late 1990s on, she did several successful dramatic TV productions, including L'onore e il rispetto/Honour and respect (Salvatore Samperi, 2006) with Gabriel Garko and Giancarlo Giannini. In 2002, Lisi starred in Il più bel giorno della mia vita/The Best Day of My Life (Cristina Comencini, and her final film was Latin Lover (Cristina Comencini, 2015), which was poshumously released. In 2014, she passed away in Rome at the age of 78. Virna Lisi was married to architect Franco Pesci and they had three grandchildren: Franco, Federico and Riccardo.
Sources: Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen, Wikipedia and IMDb.
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