Luigina "Gina" Lollobrigida (July 4, 1927 - January 16, 2023) was an Italian actress.
"La Lollo" was active in films from the late 1940s through to the early 1970s. She earned her fame in Italian cinema (her breakthrough role was in Bread, Love and Dreams in 1953) before beginning to get roles in American films in the late 1950s.
She later mostly retired from filmmaking, but took up a second career as a photographer and a humanitarian activist. She ran (unsuccessfully) for the European Parliament once. She was overshadowed by Sophia Loren (a Friendly Rival in Real Life) in public notice, but still had a considerable following, sometimes being referred to as the world's most beautiful woman (the alternative title of one of her films).
Some journalists and biographers (most notably Luis Canales in his 1990 book Imperial Gina) mention her habit of referring to herself in the third person.
She passed away at age 95 on January 16, 2023.
Films with pages on TV Tropes:
- Fanfan la Tulipe (1952)
- Beat the Devil (1953)
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956)
- Trapeze (1956)
- Never So Few (1959)
- Solomon and Sheba (1959)
- Go Naked in the World (1961)
- Strange Bedfellows (1965)
- Death Laid an Egg (1968)
This actress's work provides examples of:
- The '50s: The period of Gina's greatest success as an actress, though her best-known American films (Come September and Strange Bedfellows) were made in the early 1960s.
- Beauty Contest: Gina first came to significant public notice in 1947, when she entered the Miss Italy beauty pageant and won 3rd place. The 1st- and 2nd-place winners were, respectively, Lucia Bose and Gianna Maria Canale, who also became actresses; in fact,the Miss Italy pageants in the late 1940s and early 1950s turned out to be a fertile field for the discovery of stars and starlets for the burgeoning Italian film industry.
- The Edwardian Era: The setting of her movies La Donna 'Piu Bella Del Mondo (Beautiful But Dangerous) and Hotel Paradiso.
- Elective Broken Language: An unusual example. When she came to the United States, she actively started to learn English, but the movie studios and her co-star Humphrey Bogart liked her broken English and thick Italian accent so much that they advised her not to learn "too much" of it. To the end of her life, she still mangled her English grammar and spoke with a strong accent
in spite of having starred in American movies for several decades — but this probably helped her movie career instead of hindering it. - High-Class Gloves: In common with many other female celebrities of The '50s, La Lollo frequently wore long gloves with her formal gowns and dresses in public appearances. Many of her 1950s and early 1960s movies, especially La Donna 'Piu Bella Del Mondo (Beautiful But Dangerous, aka The World's Most Beautiful Woman), feature scenes in which she's wearing long gloves.
- Keep Circulating the Tapes: A number of her movies, such as La Donna Piu' Bella del Mondo (Beautiful But Dangerous, aka The World's Most Beautiful Woman, a biopic of Edwardian Era opera diva Lina Cavalieri), have never been officially released in the United States on VHS or DVD.
- Ms. Fanservice: Most of her movies during her time as an international star, especially La Donna 'Piu Bella Del Mondo (she has a lengthy Stocking Filler scene as a music-hall singer early on), Anna di Brooklyn (Fast and Sexy) (the most famous image from the movie shows her in a very skimpy one-piece black lace outfit), and Trapeze (arguably one of the main purposes of the movie is to show La Lollo in a revealing circus-performer costume).
- Of Corsets Sexy: Her 1950s movie, La Donna 'Piu Bella Del Mondo (Beautiful But Dangerous) shows Gina snugly corseted in several scenes, most strikingly during a fencing duel with a professional rival.
- Prefers Going Barefoot: She played a number of charismatic barefoot characters, including Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956), Maria De Ritis in Bread, Love and Dreams (1953), Marietta from The Law (1959), and Ippolita from La bellezza di Ippolita (1962). Besides, Gina may be this herself: she was the only actress to portray Esmeralda, who was shod in the original novel, in bare feet (perhaps it even was her own idea), felt very comfortable walking around barefoot during the filming, and enjoyed posing to the photographers like that.
- Soap Opera: Toward the end of her active career as an actress, Gina worked for a while on the U.S. nighttime soap Falcon Crest.
