Gina Lollobrigida, legend of Italian cinema, dead at 95

Italian display screen legend Gina Lollobrigida has died on the age of 95, news company ANSA reported, citing members of her household.

Her grandnephew, Italian Minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida, tweeted news of her dying, calling her “one of the brightest stars of Italian cinematography and culture.”

RAI state media additionally reported her dying.

Gina Lollobrigida, legend of Italian cinema, lifeless at 95 (Supplied)

Together with Sophia Loren, Lollobrigida got here to symbolise the earthy sexuality of Italian actresses within the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties.

After coaching as a painter and sculptor, Lollobrigida turned a profitable magnificence queen and mannequin, earlier than making her first movie look in 1946, with a small position within the swashbuckling journey “The Black Eagle.”

By the early Fifties, she was an enormous star in Europe. She made her English-language movie debut in 1953, in John Huston’s “Beat the Devil,” alongside Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones.

She was Esmerelda to Anthony Quinn’s Quasimodo within the 1956 adaptation of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” and the Queen of Sheba to Yul Brynner’s King Solomon in King Vidor’s 1959 Technicolor epic “Solomon and Sheba.”

When movie roles started to dwindle within the Nineteen Seventies, Lollobrigida made a brand new profession for herself as a photojournalist. She sometimes appeared in movie and on TV, most famously in a recurring position in US prime-time cleaning soap “Falcon Crest” in 1984.

Last yr, she ran unsuccessfully for a seat within the Italian Senate, telling newspaper Corriere della Sera earlier than the nation’s elections: “I was just tired of hearing politicians arguing with each other without ever getting to the point.”