Alida Valli R. I. P.

[JamesM]

Alida Valli died this morning. She also appeared in The Stranger's Hand (1952) co-starring Richard O'Sullivan. She also made appearances in The Cassandra Crossing (1977) and John Irvin's A Month By the Lake (1995). Her final film, Semana Santa (2002) was a UK-European co-production.

[Harbottle]

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[smudge]

(Harbottle @ Apr 22 2006, 07:48 PM) Quoted post</div><div class='quotemain'>

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Indeed. May I show respect and also tip my hat to another film of Miss Valli's, the excellent EYES WITHOUT A FACE.



RIP



Smudge

[theuofc]

Valli. What eyes she had and that voice. They lingered long in one's memory. I didn't realize that Valli made 121 films starting in 1934 at the age of 13 through her last film in 2002 at the age of 81, almost all Italian films except for her rare performances in English in The Third Man (1949) and The Paradine Case (1947), both of which I thought quite fine.



Best,



Barbara

[julian_craster]

Alida Valli : Obituaries



The Times April 24, 2006

Alida Valli

May 31, 1921 - April 22, 2006

Enigmatic girlfriend of Harry Lime in The Third Man





AT THE END of The Third Man (1949), in one of cinema’s most memorable dénouements, Harry Lime’s girlfriend, Anna Schmidt, played by Alida Valli, walks away from his grave and the soft-hearted consolation offered by Holly Martins, choosing the memory of Lime’s cynical charm instead.

The hauteur of her demeanour at that moment was worthy of Garbo, but though English-speaking audiences only saw Valli in roles that required an air of Nordic reserve and the qualities of a femme fatale, she was in fact Italian and, in a career that spanned 75 years, demonstrated that her range stretched far beyond melodrama.



Valli made her name before the war in Italy in ingénue parts, but when David O. Selznick brought her to Hollywood in 1947, he thought that her patrician looks and air of repressed sensuality could make her a second Ingrid Bergman. Thus in The Paradine Case (1948), one of Hitchcock’s heavier-handed thrillers, she was a suspected poisoner for whom a barrister, played by Gregory Peck, throws away his marriage and career.



Neither it nor The Miracle of the Bells (1948), with Frank Sinatra, found favour with cinemagoers, however, and Selznick had already decided to lend her out to other studios when she made The Third Man (1949) for the director Carol Reed. Disillusioned by her treatment and, it was said, by unhappy love affairs with Peck and Reed, she returned in 1950 to a newly vibrant Italy.



She was taken up by the younger generation of film-makers — Antonioni, Pasolini, Bertolucci — and in 1954 gave the finest performance of her career for Luchino Visconti in Senso. Charged by a Bruckner score, this was a lurid, almost operatic study of the folly provoked by passion, as Valli’s Venetian countess descends through humiliation and moral degradation to the betrayal of her country, all for the love of a younger Austrian soldier, played by Farley Granger.



As it was released, Valli was caught up in a scandal of her own, the greatest of the era. In 1953, the body of a young woman, Wilma Montesi, was washed up on a beach not far from Rome. Rumours of a sex-and-drugs orgy in high society were soon rife, and fingers were pointed at Piero Piccioni, the jazz musician son of a prominent politician and, said gossip, Valli’s lover.



At his subsequent trial for Montesi’s murder, Valli stuck to the alibi she had given him, notwithstanding a hail of innuendo in the press. Piccioni was acquitted, but her own career appeared to be irreparably damaged. Not for the first time, however, she proved to have more resilience and versatility than her critics believed.



She was born Baroness Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein Freunberg in 1921 in Pola, now in Croatia but then part of Italy. Her father, a teacher and writer on music, was descended from an Austrian noble family that had once been wealthy tobacco manufacturers.



Alida took to acting young, making her screen debut at the age of 9 in a short English film, Gypsy Land (1930). At 15, she entered the cinema school newly founded by Mussolini at Rome, and having acquired a more Latin stage name made her first appearance on the Italian screen in 1936, in I due sergenti. Quickly, she became the star of what were known as “white telephone” films, the genre of light romances set among the comparative luxuries of high bourgeoisie life that reflected the conservative values of the Fascist regime.



By the start of the war, she had been dubbed “Italy’s sweetheart”, and having taken the lead in Manon Lescaut (1940), was awarded the prize as best actress at the 1941 Venice Film Festival for her role as the wife in a blighted marriage in Piccolo mondo antico.



The festival was another of Il Duce’s innovations, and there were the usual rumours that she had been his lover. That year, however, her fiancé was killed in Libya, and the next came the first indications that she had ambitions to be more than the Fascists’ darling. Noi vivi (We the Living, 1942) was based on Ayn Rand’s story of a love affair in post-Revolution Russia and, luminous as Giuseppe Caracciolo’s cinematography was, it could not disguise the film’s anti- authoritarian themes. The picture was banned by the regime, and the next year Valli retired from cinema rather than be subject to its censorship. When the Government’s camp followers fled north with the Germans, she adamantly refused to follow. In 1944, she married the composer Oscar de Mejo, with whom she had two sons.



Many assumed that the end of the Mussolini years spelt the end of her stardom, but neither this, nor her experiences in America, nor the end of her marriage could dent her popularity with Italians. By the mid-1950s, she had established a strong reputation in the theatre, as well as on screen, and was quick to spot the potential of television, even appearing in several episodes of Dr Kildare.



Though Hitchcock had wanted Garbo for The Paradine Case, he revealed later that he had had to give Valli no more direction than indicating where to stand. Her talent meant that she remained in demand for the rest of her life, finally appearing in more than 100 films, among the most notable being Antonioni’s Il Grido (The Outcry, 1957), Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959) and Bertolucci’s Novecento (1976).



She also featured in the disaster film The Cassandra Crossing (1977) and A Month by the Lake (1994), with Vanessa Redgrave. Her last film, La Sconosciuta, was made earlier this year. She was awarded the Golden Lion for her body of work at Venice in 1997.



Her sons survive her.



Alida Valli, actress, was born on May 31, 1921. She died on April 22, 2006, aged 84.



-------------------------------------------------------



The Guardian Obituary



Alida Valli

Italian film star idolised by Mussolini and betrayed by Harry Lime



John Francis Lane

Monday April 24, 2006

The Guardian





The Italian film icon from the 1930s onwards, Alida Valli, who has died aged 84, was described by Benito Mussolini as the most beautiful woman in the world after Greta Garbo. He was not her only fan. Most Italian directors of the time were in love with her, and her countrymen and women considered her a national sweetheart. After the war, she found international stardom in Hollywood, though undoubtedly her best English-language role was as Anna Schmidt, Harry Lime's grieving girlfriend, in The Third Man.



Born Alida von Altenburger in Pula, in what is now Croatia but was then part of the Italian kingdom, Alida moved with her family to Como, in northern Italy, while still a girl. When her father died, she and her mother went to Rome, where she enrolled at the capital's newly inaugurated film school, Centro Sperimentale. In 1936 she beat four rival students for a small part in I due sergenti (The Two Sergeants), directed by Enrico Guazzoni, who had made the Italian silent film classic, the first Quo Vadis?

Alida was still not particularly ambitious, but was encouraged by the Centro's teachers, particularly film historian Francesco Pasinetti, who had every right to claim later that he had been her Pygmalion. The name Alida Valli was invented for her, and in 1937 she made five films, winning such popularity that her salary was increased with every picture. Having discovered that she could support her whole family, she decided that the career was worth pursuing.



She became one of the top stars of Italian cinema, appearing mostly in comedies or romantic melodramas. Then, in 1940, she was cast as the heroine in Mario Soldati's adaptation of Fogazzaro's 19th-century novel, Piccolo Mondo Antico. She was not Soldati's first choice, but once on the set she enchanted the director with her beauty and talent. The film was a triumph and Alida won a best actress award. During the second world war, she made many films, including the striking two-part Noi Vivi/Addio Kira! (We the Living), directed by Goffredo Alessandrini, about the hardships of life in post-revolutionary St Petersburg. She and Rossano Brazzi played the tragic young lovers, and the film was acclaimed at the Axis-dominated 1942 Venice film festival, where its anti-communist message was much appreciated.



In 1944, Alida married Oscar De Mejo, a jazz pianist. Their son, Carlo, was born a year later, by which time Alida had been offered a Hollywood contract by David Selznick. There were initial problems over her American visa after an anonymous letter to the US embassy in Rome accused her of fascist sympathies and of having slept with Hitler's propanganda chief Joseph Goebbels. But Selznick's lawyers disproved the allegations and the visa was granted, with apologies.



In Hollywood Alida was groomed into a mysterious, vamp-like creature - she was known quite simply as Valli. Her first film there was Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947), in which her icy aloofness gave a mistaken idea of her talents. In 1948 came Miracle of the Bells, in which she co-starred with Frank Sinatra, whom she would later describe as "the greatest (unrequited) passion of my life". The film was a flop. Then came Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949).



After Alida returned to Europe - without De Mejo, who had discovered a vocation as a painter and stayed on in the US - she made the odd film in France and Italy. Then, in the mid-1950s, her career entered a new phase with roles in auteur films such as Visconti's Senso (1954), in which she played an Italian countess in love with an Austrian officer (Farley Granger), and Antonioni's Il Grido (1957), which had won her praise and almost cult status.



This success, however, was clouded by her affair with a friend of her ex-husband's, Piero Piccioni, the son of a Christian Democrat minister, who had been implicated in the Montesi case, a scandal that rocked Italian society and politics. The case revolved around the death of a young woman, Wilma Montesi, and Alida was called as a witness at Piccioni's trial, attracting much unfavourable press publicity in the process.



During the next decade Alida struggled to rebuild her career, working mainly abroad. In the early 1960s, she moved to Mexico for three years, married director Giancarlo Zagni and appeared in several films and television plays. Back in Italy her reputation was re-established with such films as Pasolini's Oedipus Rex (1967), Bertolucci's The Spider's Strategem (1970), 1900 (1976) and La Luna (1979).



Her theatrical career took off in 1956, when Zagni directed her in Ibsen's Rosmersholm and Pirandello's The Man, the Beast and Virtue. Among her most memorable stage performances were as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the mother in Genet's Paravents, Deborah in More Stately Mansions, and the Katharine Hepburn role in Suddenly Last Summer. Under the direction of Patrice Chéreau, she played at the Milan Piccolo Teatro in Wedekind's Lulu. When both in their 80s, Alida and Raf Vallone appeared together as grandparents celebrating their golden wedding in a tragi-comedy TV movie, Vino Santo. The marriage to Zagni ended in 1970.



On the whole, Alida hated talking about the past. A 1995 book, for instance, contained only interviews with journalists, apart from an epilogue of her laconic words on the telephone: "Don't bother, lasci perdere; it isn't worth it." But during the 1990s, when she was making her last stage appearances touring in two Pirandello plays, she played in the Calabrian town where I live. We had dinner after the show, with Carlo, who was also in the company, and she told us that there had not been another man in her life. She was still a very beautiful woman.



She received a life achievement Golden Lion award at the Venice film festival in 1997. Carlo and her second son, Larry, survive her.



Alida Valli (von Altenburger), actor, born May 31 1921; died April 22 2006

[julian_craster]

Alida Valli

Daily Telegraph

(Filed: 24/04/2006)



Alida Valli, who died in Rome on Saturday aged 84, achieved brief Hollywood

fame after the Second World War as "Valli", before returning to her native

Italy and a more distinguished career in films by such directors as Luchino

Visconti, Bernardo Bertolucci and Michelangelo Antonioni.



Her aristocratic mien made her particularly suitable for costume parts.

High-born ladies suffering through unsuitable love affairs were her forte,

and never more so than in Visconti's Senso (1954), in which she plays an

Italian countess of the Risorgimento torn between patriotism and infatuation

with a shallow Austrian officer (Farley Granger). It ends in tears,

betrayal, execution and madness.



Although attractive, she lacked vivacity and true star quality. There was

always something dejected about a Valli performance, which perhaps explains

her failure to capitalise on Hollywood's interest in the late Forties. David

O Selznick, who signed her to a contract, wanted a new Garbo, but Alida

Valli did not have the charisma to carry it off.



She was, however, ideally cast as the stateless Anna in the Carol

Reed/Graham Greene film The Third Man (1949). Hopelessly attached to the

memory of her supposedly dead lover, Harry Lime, she goes through the

motions of living but is dead inside. It was her finest performance in

English, and the one by which film buffs still remember her.



As she aged, her face grew gaunt and staring, opening up a lucrative new

career in the field of horror. A key film here was Georges Franju's Les Yeux

sans visage (1960), made in France, in which she plays a mad surgeon's

partner in crime. She lures young girls to a lonely sanatorium, where he

removes their faces to graft on to his daughter's deformed features.



It set a pattern for the future, which was to include two appearances in

films by the master of horror, Dario Argento. In Suspiria (1977) she and the

Hollywood veteran Joan Bennett played witches running a coven; and in the

same director's Inferno (1980) she plunged to her death engulfed in flames.



She was born Alida Maria Laura von Altenburger on May 3 1921 at Pula, Italy,

the daughter of a journalist of Austrian descent and of an Italian mother.

The family moved to Como, where Alida attended a local school until the age

of 15. Afterwards she went to Rome to study acting at the Centro

Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the motion picture academy set up by

Mussolini.



After a year's study she was given a one-reel test which was so promising

that she was offered a contract with the production company Italcine. Her

earliest work is now mostly forgotten - part of the so-called "white

telephone" era, a derogatory term applied to the vapid comedies then typical

of Italian cinema. Among the better ones were Mille Lire al Mese (1939),

which she made for Max Neufeld, and T'amerò sempre (1943), directed by Mario

Camerini.



She also appeared in several acclaimed costume dramas, assuming the title

role in Manon Lescaut (1939), opposite Vittorio De Sica as des Grieux, and

scoring a personal triumph in Mario Soldati's 1941 version of the classic

Italian novel by Antonio Fogazzaro, Piccolo Mondo Antico. One film of the

period, Ore Nove - Lezione di Chimica (1941), about a schoolgirl with a

crush on her teacher, was exhumed after she went to Hollywood and released

to puzzled international audiences.



The most ambitious film she made during the war was Noi Vivi (1942), based

on the novel We the Living by Ayn Rand, which the director Goffredo

Alessandrini simply lifted without the author's approval. In wartime any

question of royalties or legal action was academic. The story is set in

Soviet Russia, with Alida Valli draped in a shawl to lend it an authentic

foreign flavour. A sprawling saga intended to expose the horrors of

Communism, it ran for more than three hours and was released in two parts,

winning a prize at the Venice Film Festival.



As the war turned against Mussolini, Alessandrini was accused of having

"intentionally made an anti-totalitarian propaganda film against the Fascist

regime". Five months after the initial release it was withdrawn and

consigned to the vaults, where it remained for more than 45 years.



For Alida Valli, memories of the film were marred by personal grief. During

production she discovered that her lover, a fighter pilot, had been killed

in action. He was the son of a rich textile manufacturer from Como, but his

family did not approve of his associating with an actress, and had forced

him into an arranged marriage. His was one of two planes shot down by

British fighters in a skirmish over Africa; only one pilot parachuted to

safety, and it was more than a year before Alida Valli learned that her

lover had not survived. Rather than make propaganda films for the Fascists,

she went into hiding. Her mother was shot.



She made no films for two years, in the meantime marrying the composer Oscar

de Mejo, who later accompanied her to Hollywood and wrote the song All I

Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.



She returned to the screen in 1945 with La Vita ricomincia, a barnstorming

melodrama about a returned PoW who discovers that his wife has murdered the

man to whom she had surrendered to save her baby's life.



More successful was Eugenia Grandet (1946), an adaptation of Balzac's novel

in which she played the title role and which caught the eye of the Hollywood

mogul David O Selznick. He put her under contract, casting her in The

Paradine Case (1948) as a woman accused of murder and defended by a lawyer

(Gregory Peck) who falls in love with his client. Although directed by

Alfred Hitchcock, it was a ponderous court-room drama that pleased neither

critics nor public.



The films in which Selznick lent her to another studio, RKO, were even less

auspicious. In Miracle of the Bells (1948), she played a Polish burlesque

queen who becomes a Hollywood star, but the story is told in flashback from

her funeral. Audiences found it difficult to care about a character who was

dead before the film had begun.



In The White Tower (1950) she was implausibly cast as a mountaineer

desperate to beat Lloyd Bridges's Nazi to the top of an Alpine peak; and in

Walk Softly Stranger (1950) she was confined to a wheelchair. Were it not

for The Third Man, it would be hard to imagine a Hollywood career more

comprehensively sabotaged. She set the final seal on it herself by declining

to attend an audition for the film Five Fingers, on the ground that she

loathed flying and would therefore arrive too late.



Returning to Italy, she floundered in the early Fifties with a series of

ill-chosen roles in such films as Siamo Donne, The Lovers of Toledo and The

Stranger's Hand, an Anglo-Italian melodrama with Trevor Howard from a story

by Graham Greene, in which she played a hotel receptionist. All three were

made in 1953. It was a low point in her career, from which Luchino Visconti

rescued her with the lead role in Senso, for which she won the best actress

award at the Venice Film Festival in 1954.



Between 1954 and 1957 she made no films, her career temporarily overshadowed

by a sex-and-drugs scandal involving the death of a young girl named Wilma

Montesi, found dead on a beach near Rome. The prime suspect was Pietro

Piccioni, the son of a former foreign minister. Alida Valli was called upon

to support his alibi that, at the time of the girl's death, he was 200 miles

south in Amalfi suffering from tonsilitis and a high temperature. She

confirmed that she and Piccioni had been staying there in a villa as guests

of Carlo Ponti.



When she resumed her career, it was increasingly in character parts in films

by leading international directors. One of her finest performances was in

Henri Colpi's Une aussi longue absence (1961) as a saloon-keeper who

suspects that the tramp who patronises her bar is the husband she lost in

the war.



For Michelangelo Antonioni she made Il Grido in 1957, playing a

working-class woman; for René Clément she appeared in The Sea Wall in 1958;

and for Claude Chabrol she was Gertrude in Ophélia (1962), an up-dated

version of Hamlet. Also memorable was her haughty old lady with the

priceless literary letters in Aspern (1982), an adaptation by Eduardo de

Gregorio of The Aspern Papers.



From 1970 she formed a productive working association with Bernardo

Bertolucci, for whom she starred in The Spider's Strategem, originally made

for television from a story by Jorge Luis Borges, and played in smaller

parts in 1900 (1976) and La Luna (1979). She also appeared in his brother

Giuseppe's 1985 film Segreti Segreti.



In addition to her film work, Alida Valli enjoyed a long career on the

Italian stage, beginning in 1955 with William Archibald's The Innocents. She

also starred in Ibsen's Rosmersholm; Pirandello's Henry IV; John Osborne's

Epitaph for George Dillon; and Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge. Her

television work included The Browning Version and O'Neill's Mourning Becomes

Electra.



Alida Valli separated from her husband, Oscar de Mejo, in 1952, after eight

years of marriage. They had two sons.

[julian_craster]

The Independent & The Independent on Sunday

25 April 2006 08:50 Home > News > People > Obituaries



Alida Valli

Prolific and patrician actress best remembered for her chilling Anna Schmidt in 'The Third Man'





Alida Maria Laura Altenburger (Alida Valli), actress: born Pola, Italy 31 May 1921; married 1944 Oscar De Mejo (died 1992; two sons; marriage dissolved 1952); died Rome 22 April 2006.



The Italian actress Alida Valli (billed simply as Valli in her English-speaking films) made over 100 movies but will be best remembered for her starring role in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), one of the greatest of British films. As Anna Schmidt, the Czech refugee and enigmatic sweetheart of the racketeer Harry Lime in post-war Vienna, she gave a chilling performance of a woman ultimately drained of feeling or passion, and featured in one of the most famous final scenes in cinema history.



After Lime's funeral, Anna is seen in the distance walking towards the camera down a long lane in the cemetery. Waiting to one side is Lime's former friend, Holly (Joseph Cotten), who has fallen in love with her. Her face emotionless, Anna continues walking straight past him with no acknowledgement as, to the accompaniment of Anton Karas's zither music, the film ends.



Valli made other notable films, including Luchino Visconti's Senso and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem, and for Alfred Hitchcock she played another enigmatic heroine, the mysterious Mrs Paradine, accused of murdering her wealthy husband in The Paradine Case, but Reed's masterpiece was her finest hour.



Born Alida Maria Laura Altenburger in 1921 in Pola, Istria (then in Italy but now a region of Croatia), she had an Italian mother and a journalist father of Austrian descent. She made her first feature film, Il Cappello a tre punte (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1934), at the age of 13, after training at Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the film school set up by Benito Mussolini, and immediately won admirers for her winning personality and dark-haired beauty.



In 1939 she achieved stardom with the title role in Manon Lescaut, co- starring Vittorio De Sica, and other films in which she starred included Oltre l'amore ("Beyond Love", 1940) and Piccolo mondo antico (Old-fashioned World, 1941), which won her the Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival. She won further acclaim for her portrayal of a Russian anti- Communist who flirts with a party official to get medical treatment for her lover (Rosanno Brazzi) in Noi vivi (We the Living, 1942). Based on a novel by Ayn Rand, the film was quickly banned by the Fascists, who detected an anti-totalitarian message, but in recent years it has been recovered and favourably re-evaluated.



In 1944 Valli married the Surrealist painter and jazz composer Oscar De Mejo, and they had two sons, Roberto and Carlo. Valli had stopped appearing in films, refusing to support works of Fascist propaganda - though her mother was shot and wounded by anti-Fascists in 1945 for alleged collaboration.



Valli had a great success in 1946 when she played the title role in Eugenia Grandet, based on the novel by Balzac. The film brought her to the attention of the producer David O. Selznick, who signed her to a personal contract, and in 1947 Valli and her husband moved to the United States. Selznick hoped to duplicate the success he had had with his former protégée Ingrid Bergman, but Valli's first two Hollywood films were not successful, though the first was directed by Alfred Hitchcock.



The "master of suspense" had hoped to lure Greta Garbo out of retirement to play the suspected murderess in The Paradine Case (1948), but, when Garbo refused the part, he borrowed Valli from Selznick. The actress had the glacial, patrician qualities which the director favoured and which suited the role, but the film was overlong, uninvolving and not one of Hitchcock's best. It was much better, though, than Valli's next movie, a lachrymose drama entitled The Miracle of the Bells (1948), co-starring Fred MacMurray and Frank Sinatra, in which she played a former chorus girl who becomes a movie star and dies after the strain of playing Joan of Arc on screen.



Valli then starred with Joseph Cotten in a mild film noir, Walk Softly, Stranger, filmed in 1948 but not released until two years later, after she had starred in The Third Man.



Produced by Alexander Korda and Selznick, who had both Valli and Joseph Cotten under contract, The Third Man was written by Graham Greene, whose original denouement was more optimistic, but, when Selznick and Reed suggested a less cosy ending, Greene was wholeheartedly in agreement. Welles, who described Valli as "the sexiest thing you ever saw in your life", wrote later that during filming he was hardly aware of her because of another infatuation he had at the time:



"I see The Third Man every two or three years - it is the only movie of mine I watch on television because I like it so much - and I look at Alida Valli and I say, "What was in your mind when you were 10 days in Vienna and you didn't make a move?" She drives me mad with lust when I see her in it!"



After completing The Third Man, Valli returned to Hollywood to make The White Tower (1950) with Glenn Ford and Claude Rains, a mountaineering tale in which she played a young woman determined to conquer the mountain that killed her father. But the American public had failed to respond to her significantly, and Selznick allowed her to break her contract and return to Italy, where she was to be constantly busy for virtually the rest of her life.



In Visconti's sumptuous Senso (a.k.a. Livia, 1953), a melodramatic piece set in Venice during the Risorgimento and styled like grand opera, she gave one of her finest performances (which won her a Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival) as a married noblewoman fighting for the cause of independence and having an affair with an Austrian officer (Farley Granger).



Valli's personal life was similarly dramatic - in her early days there were rumours of an affair with Mussolini, and during the Second World War she had fallen in love with a fighter pilot whose family had forbidden him to marry her and who was later killed in action. During her Hollywood period she is alleged to have had brief affairs with Gregory Peck and Carol Reed, and she herself confessed to an unrequited passion for Sinatra.



In 1952 she divorced Mejo, and in 1954 her involvement in a highly publicised sex, drugs and murder scandal almost ruined her career. Pietro Piccione, the son of a former foreign minister, was suspected of murdering a young girl found dead on a beach near Rome, and Valli was the principal witness for his defence, claiming that she and Piccione were having an affair and that she had been with him at Carlo Ponti's villa in Amalfi at the time of the girl's death. The scandal, with its "dolce vita" aspects and suggestions of society orgies, kept her off the screen for two years.



She turned to the stage, forming a theatre group with two friends, and over the years she appeared in works by Ibsen, Pirandello, Williams, Sartre, Miller and others. She resumed her screen career with such notable films as the early Michelangelo Antonioni drama Il Grido (The Cry, 1957) and the chilling horror tale Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959), in which she is a plastic surgeon's assistant, kidnapping and murdering beautiful girls so that the surgeon can graft their skin on to his disfigured daughter's face.



Valli herself did not age well, her features becoming hard and grim, and many of her later films featured her as strict or frustrated matrons. In Henri Colpi's poignant Une aussi longue absence (The Long Absence, 1961), she gave a beautifully understated portrayal of a café owner who meets a tramp who may or may not be the husband who disappeared 15 years earlier. In Claude Chabrol's Ophélia (1962), a modern-day variation on Hamlet, she was convincingly wracked as the mother who after being widowed swiftly marries her husband's brother. She was Merope in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex, 1967), and in Bertolucci's Strategia del ragno (The Spider's Stratagem, 1970), made for Italian television but released theatrically in the UK and the US, she was a mother concealing from her son that his father was not a hero who fought the Fascists in 1936, but actually a traitor. Time magazine called her performance "magnificently strong".



She later played smaller parts in two more Bertolucci films, 1900 (1976) and La Luna (a.k.a. Luna, 1979). Occasionally she returned to the US for roles on television, including a three-episode story of Dr Kildare in which she played an old sweetheart of Dr Gillespie (Raymond Massey).



Several of Valli's later films were exploitation films of horror and fantasy, including House of Exorcism (1975), The Antichrist (1976), Suor omicidi (The Killer Nun, 1979), and two of Dario Argento's stylish but gory thrillers, Suspiria (1976) and Inferno (1980). In 1995 she appeared in A Month at the Lake with Vanessa Redgrave. Her last film was La Sconosciuta ("The Unknown"), which she recently completed.



In 1997 Valli, who in her later years vehemently refused to talk to journalists about The Third Man, was awarded a Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival for life achievement.



Tom Vallance

[Phil Turner]

Very sad to learn of Alida Valli's death. Her performance in The Third Man will live long in my memory. I particularly love the final scene in the cemetery when she walks impassively past Joseph Cotten. I also enjoyed her performance in The Paradine Case, even though it wasn't one of Hitchcock's finest films. A short career in British cinema, but a truly memorable one.