Italian actor Virna Lisi, famed in the 1960s for appearing opposite Hollywood stars, including Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Frank Sinatra, has died at the age of 78 in Rome.
During her career which started when she was a teenager in 1953, Lisi played memorable roles in European and Hollywood films, receiving many awards including a career Golden Globe in 2004 and two David di Donatello Career Awards in 1996 and 2009, reported IANS.
Lisi won the Best Female Actor Award in 1994 at the Cannes Film Festival for her performance as the maleficent queen Caterina de’ Medici in La Reine Margot by French director Patrice Cereau.
In 1965, the blue-eyed, blonde actor debuted in Hollywood in How To Murder Your Wife (1965) by American actor and film director Richard Quine. Her role in the comedy film, opposite Jack Lemmon, saw her pop out of a wedding cake clad in a bikini in one famous scene.
Lisi also appeared in Assault on a Queen opposite Sinatra in 1966 and performed alongside Tony Curtis in Not With My Wife, You Don’t in the same year, reported bbc.com.
In the late 1960s, she broke her seven-year contract with Paramount and was back to Europe, where she struggled to find roles suitable to her.
She turned down the role in director Roger Vadim’s classic Barbarella, eventually filled by Jane Fonda, leading to a break from acting during the early 1970s.
The last of Lisi’s films The Best Day of My Life was made in her native Italy in 2002.
Lisi is survived by a son, Corrado, and three grandchildren. Her husband of 53 years, Italian architect Franco Pesci, died last year.
Born in Ancona, a city in central Italy, Lisi had been diagnosed with an unspecified form of cancer one month ago.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 20th, 2014.
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