French postcard by S.I.P, series, 30, no. 2. Photo: Reutlinger, Paris.
Around 1900, Italian soprano
Lina Cavalieri (1874-1944) was considered the most beautiful woman on earth.
As a young girl, she ran from the orphanage with a theatre group and made a career as a Vaudeville singer first in Paris and soon all around Europe. In 1900 she debuted as an opera singer, soon conquering the opera houses of Monte-Carlo, Paris and New York. She was famous for her hourglass-like corsets, visible in photographs and portraits by Cesare Tallone and Giovanni Boldini.
In 1913, Cavalieri married French tenor Lucien Muratore and withdrew from the stage, instead starting a career in cinema, first in the United States in Manon Lescaut (1914), with Muratore as Des Grieux; in Italy from 1915 on (La sposa della morte, 1915; La rosa di Granada, 1916, both directed by Emilio Ghione); and from 1917 onwards again in the United States (The Eternal Tempress, Emile Chautard 1917; Love's Conquest, 1918; A Woman of Impulse, 1918; The Two Brides, 1919, all three directed by Edward José). In her films, we see Cavalieri in her forties, past her prime. Most films also lack, alas.
Her voice lacks too, as very few records recording her voice were made. During the Second World War, Cavalieri worked as a volunteer nurse. She was killed in an Allied bombing raid which destroyed her home near Florence. Lina Cavalieri was immortalised in the 1955 Italian biopic dedicated to her life: La donna più bella del mondo, starring Gina Lollobrigida.
Hear Lina's voice on YouTube, singing the Jewel Aria from Gounod's Faust
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqn6-HpXIWE
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
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