The world without Gina Lollobrigida: we remember the successes of the actress and her deep rivalry with Sophia Loren

The writer Alberto Moravia wrote at the beginning of his novel “La Romana”: “At seventeen, I was a true beauty (…) My mother said that I looked like a Virgin. A body like mine, she said, was not to be found in all of Rome. The self-awareness of the protagonist of one of the starkest literary testimonies about the moral misery of post-war Italy, the stark story of a young woman led to the mercy of her own mother, could also be the physical description of Gina Lollobrigidaactress who, precisely, embodied the character in the homonymous film shot by Luigi Zampa in 1954.

Died yesterday at the age of 95 at her home in Rome, the actress was the epitome of robust beauty; Upright and shaped like a statue, “la Lollo” stood out in Italy in the fifties, in a cinema prodigal with pale-faced beauties. When, after the phenomenon of Italian Neorealism, when the chaos and confusion of Italy at the end of the war were portrayed, the producers of the time sought, in order to conquer the foreign box office, to maintain the ability to put found characters on the screen on the street and turn their anonymous stories into a mirror of a collective condition, but also point to female beauty as a national asset, discovering and valuing new faces and bodies. It is the time of great divas like Lucía Bosé, Eleonora Rossi Drago, Silvana Pampanini, Ivonne Sanson, and especially Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, whose attributes left their mark on the hearts and fantasies of the general public.

It is said that it was for “la Lollo” that the Roman filmmaker Alessandro Blasetti coined the malicious term “maggiorata”, which defined by extension a group of actresses, largely recruited through the Miss Italy contest, who shone more for their gifts. physical than for his acting skills, although other authors give Vittorio De Sica the paternity of the term. The truth is that as far as the physical gifts that the term celebrates, there is no discussion: prosperous breasts and ample hips in those who were true Botticellian beauties. These are new measures that mark an aggressive display of the body, an announcement of the disclosure to be seen in the following decade, with the appearance and triumph of the bikini.

As the critic Ricardo Bedoya points out, Lollobrigida was one of the maggiorates with which post-war Italian cinema dazzled the international box office. “The Via Crucis of the neorealist man looking for his bicycle in a Rome without glamor, was replaced by the notorious profiles of Gina, Sophia Loren, Silvana Mangano, among other talented and charming figures who toured an Italy of costumbrista prints and a lot of local color. By the way, they took a tour of Hollywood. For the prominent critic, the actress will go down in history in roles as unforgettable as the already mentioned “La Romana” in “Bread, Love and Fantasy” (Luigi Comencini, 1953), “Trapeze” (Carol Reed, 1956) or, he adds, putting Yul Brynner back and a half in the improbable “Solomon and the Queen of Sheba” (King Vidor, 1959).

Indeed, it will be throughout the decade of the 50s that the world will attend, fascinated, the flowering of divas who managed, for a good time, to balance the relationship of forces with North American cinema. This allowed both Lollobrigida and Loren to travel to the United States to rightfully replace local stars in the national imagination. Gina Lollobrigida made her United States debut with La burla del diablo, directed by John Huston, and with colleagues such as Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones. Her fame grew film by film and the press said of her that she was The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, the title of the film in which she starred alongside Vittorio Gassman. In those years, “Lollo” was divided between the Cinecittà studios in Rome and Hollywood, with unforgettable works such as “Beat the Devil” (1953) with Humphrey Bogart, or “Trapeze” (1956) with Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster.

Converted into ambassadors of Italian cinema in the world, in the United States both actresses tended two very different fates. For Sophia Loren it was the opportunity to mature and become aware of her genuine talent, especially after receiving the Oscar at the age of 26 with “La Ciociara”. On the other hand, for Lollobrigida it will be the beginning of a slow decline. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find a role that would allow her to reveal more than the dimensions of her personality. Although beautiful at the beginning of the sixties, Lollobrigida was in an early decline, seeing how Loren, her eternal rival seven years younger, rose after signing with Paramount, much better adjusted to the new canons, to a cinema in tune with the changes, the emergence of the youth world, the demand for new behavior models. Without directors and stories capable of valuing her in her most mature phase, the diva did not want to dedicate herself to living on her own legend: she moved away from cinema in the mid-seventies and worked as a press photographer, journalist and sculptor. . In 1984, she returned to the shooting set, this time for television, in the famous series “Falcon Crest”, in the role of Francesca Gioberti. She was then almost 60 years old and she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. A very sweet triumph for her, especially since it is a role that the hated Sophia of hers rejected before her.