Italian screen legend Gina Lollobrigida has died. She was 95.
She passed away on in a Rome clinic on Monday, her lawyer Giulia Citani said.
Lollobrigida made a name for herself as an actress in the 1950s and 1960s, starring with icons such as Humphrey Bogart, Rock Hudson, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Frank Sinatra.
Over her long career, she starred in projects such as “Crossed Swords,” “Trapeze,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Beat the Devil,” “Falcon Crest” and “Beautiful But Dangerous.”
Lollobrigida even dabbled with photojournalism and politics in her life, in conjunction with acting.
In the 1970s, she photographed figures including Paul Newman, Salvador Dalí, Henry Kissinger, David Cassidy, Audrey Hepburn and Ella Fitzgerald.
In 1999, she decided to run for election to the European Parliament as a candidate for The Democrats, however, she failed to score a seat.
“I’ve never been involved in politics,” she confessed at the time, “but when I got the offer I said ‘yes’ immediately … It’s only afterward that I thought about why this was a good thing. I don’t know how many votes I need. I don’t know anything.”
“La Lollo” — as she was also known as — was born in 1927 in Subiaco, a town near Rome as the daughter of a furniture maker.
She entered the Miss Italia pageant in 1947 to try her hand at modeling and ultimate placed third in the event. In her adolescent years, she also studied sculpture at Rome’s Academy of Fine Arts.
While much of the world was infatuated with Lollobrigida’s beauty, one man stood out from the rest: billionaire Howard Hughes.
The aviator saw her in a publicity shoot and asked her to travel to Hollywood for a screen test. The eccentric celeb also tried to beguile her, despite her already being married to a Slovenian doctor, Milko Škofič.
Škofič and Lollobrigida were married from 1949 until 1971 and shared one child, Andrea Milko.
“Time and time he tried to get me!” Lollobrigida said in an interview with Vanity Fair about Hughes’ advances. “But he didn’t succeed … there was just too much difference between us. I said to him, ‘If you lose all your money, then perhaps I’ll marry you.’ Maybe he was surprised that there was one person who wasn’t interested in his money.”
Lollobrigida later retired from filming in 1997 and told PARADE in April 2000: “I studied painting and sculpting at school and became an actress by mistake … I’ve had many lovers and still have romances. I am very spoiled. All my life, I’ve had too many admirers.”
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