Italian actress Alida Valli, who featured in films by Alfred Hitchcock and Luchino Visconti, died in Rome on Saturday at the age of 84, Ansa news agency said.
She made her cinema debut at the age of 15 and appeared in more than 100 films.
The best known include Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947) with Gregory Peck, The Miracle of the Bells (1948) by Irving Pichel with Frank Sinatra, Carole Reed’s The Third Man (1949) with Orson Welles, and Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954), in which she starred as Countess Livia Serpieri.
She married surrealist painter Oscar de Mejo in 1994 but the couple divorced several years later.
”Alida Valli’s passing is a great loss for Italian cinema, theatre and culture,” said Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.
Rome mayor Walter Veltroni praised her ”incredible talent” and said Italy has ”lost one of its most beautiful faces”.
Valli was born Alida Maria Laura von Altenburger on May 31 1921 in Pola, which was then part of Italy and has since become Pula, in Croatia.
She was discovered by United States producer David Selznick, who gave her a contract thinking that he had found a second Ingrid Bergman.
Her English-language film career was short-lived due to her thick accent but she continued to work in the Italian, and occasionally French, cinema, also starring in plays by Camus, Ibsen and D’Annunzio.
Valli was awarded Italy’s top David film prize in 1982 for her supporting role in Marco Tullio Giordana’s La Caduta degli Angeli Ribelli (The Fall of the Rebel Angels) and another one for her career in 1991.
The Venice film festival gave her a Golden Lion for her contribution to Italian cinema in 1997. — AFP
