The mischievous woman and the queen – Newspaper Kommersant No. 7 (7452) of 01/17/2023

At the age of 96, Gina Lollobrigida, the first European movie star, died in Rome, dazzlingly covering the Soviet thaw film distribution in the films Fanfan-Tulip (Christian-Jacques, 1952) and Bread, Love and Fantasy (Luigi Comencini, 1953). The last rival of Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren, with whom Gina seriously fought on the field of sex appeal and, above all, ideal bodily proportions, has passed away.

“I have seen many stars in the sky, but I have never seen one like you,” Yuri Gagarin signed his photo at the 1961 Moscow Film Festival to Gina. Maybe he didn’t sign. “I am still not married, only because I have not met a woman like you,” Fidel Castro told her. Or maybe he didn’t say. “They call me American Gina,” Marilyn Monroe jealously complained to her. “And me, the Italian Monroe,” Gina retorted. Or maybe she didn’t parry. When Sophia Loren insured her bust for $120,000, Gina responded with insurance for $600,000. Or maybe she didn’t. They say that the Syrian general Atlas forbade his fellows to shoot at Italian soldiers in Lebanon so that the adored Gina would not be offended. Or maybe not banned. What difference does it make if a Robert Z. Leonard movie starring Gina was called The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (1955).

Gina was not a great actress, like Sophia Loren or Claudia Cardinale, and did not pretend to play dramatic roles. She did not want to be an actress at all and became one, in her own words, “by mistake.” The girl, the daughter of a carpenter, dreamed of becoming either an opera singer or an artist, and in the devastated post-war Rome she drew caricatures on the streets for passers-by: hey, sir, buy it, cheap. But her mother made her plunge into the cinema pool. Say, your three sisters are already playing in the crowd and bring into the house money that is unthinkable for a poor, really poor family. What are you better at? It turned out that everything is better.

If cinema is a universal dream, the embodiment of the collective unconscious, then young Gina was the dream of a psychoanalyst incarnate. Wasp waist combined with a legendary bust, raven hair and wide eyes. Surprisingly, having started her film career in Italy in the late 1940s, she successfully passed her passion for hard, social neorealism: no more heroines of the Resistance, no girls who fell through the fault of a cruel life. Having played the Mischievous Mary, the object of desire of the provincial carabinieri in Comencini’s Bread, Love and Fantasy, she became a symbol of the so-called pink neo-realism. Cinema, where everything seems to be like in life, but exactly what it seems to be. A movie that consoled the Italians: everything will be fine, and there will be plenty of bread, and love in abundance, and any fantasies will come true.

And Gina was the main gypsy of world cinema in the 1950s. Real, like Esmeralda in Jean Delannoy’s adaptation of Notre Dame Cathedral (1956).

Anyone who has not seen dancing in the square in front of the Cathedral of Gina Esmeralda does not know, I am not afraid to say, anything about the on-screen sexuality of bygone times.

Or a fake gypsy, like Adeline in Fanfan the Tulip, who lures the simpleton Fanfan into the ranks of the royal army during the Seven Years’ War.

Naturally, Hollywood could not miss such a tasty morsel as Gina. She was lured to California by what is said to be the insane and sleazy playboy, the richest man in the world, Howard “The Aviator” Hughes. Of her Hollywood experiences, only King Vidor’s film Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (1959) remained in history. Gina, of course, played the queen: well, who else could she play.

In the early 1970s, unexpectedly playing in the author’s film Jerzy Skolimowski’s “King, Queen, Jack” (1972), Lollobrigida almost parted with the cinema. She devoted herself to photography and sculpture, which she had dreamed of since her youth. In January 1996, she brought her small exhibition to the Moscow Film Festival “Faces of Love”, drank champagne with the author of these lines and seemed to be carelessly happy – like the heroines of her films of the 1950s.

Mikhail Trofimenkov