Pier Angeli

Anna Maria Pierangeli was born in Cagliari, on the Italian island of Sardinia, on June 19, 1932. The same as her twin sister Maria Luisa. They both loved movies and dreamed of being actresses. And they both achieved it, although it was Anna Maria, who chose her split surname as a stage name, Pier Angeli, who achieved fame, although at the cost of her life, as she died of an overdose of barbiturates in Beverly Hills, California, on September 10, 1971, without reaching the age of 40. She is survived to this day by her twin, who also changed her name and as an actress she responds to Marisa Pavan . Truly her sweet face and, better said, angelic of hers, did not foresee a tormented life to the point of her tragic and premature end.

Angeli’s acting debut could not have been better, as she had a leading role in a teenage love story alongside Vittorio De Sica , her teacher in Tomorrow will be late ( Léonide Moguy , 1950). He would repeat with the same director and a different character in a film with a similar title, Tomorrow will be another day (1951), so good was the reception of the other. The following year he cast a soon-to-be-famous filmmaker, Fred Zinnemann , in Teresa , where she was just this character, the girlfriend who welcomes a war veteran back home. It was his first work in English, although he also had phrases in Italian. The miracle of the painting also took place in Italy (Richard Brooks , 1952), where she was perfect as the naive girl entangled in the theft of paintings by two famous thieves. With Brooks she would reprise in Flame and the Flesh (1954), alongside Lana Turner .

In Three Loves (1953), where he was directed by Vincente Minnelli , he coincided with Kirk Douglas, with whom he had an affair. According to the actor, she taught him a long sentence in Italian that read “E una cosa triste, bisogna lavorare per vivere, eh?”, meaning, “It’s sad to have to work for a living, huh?” Douglas claimed to be very much in love with the actress, and that he had wedding plans, although he warned that his mother kept him away from her, and later he came to describe the idyll in his memoirs “The Trapper’s Son” as a “silly fantasy”: he He loved her impetuosity and wrote about her that “she looked like a child who always laughed, in my eyes she was an angelic creature.” She would marry Victor Damone in 1954, with whom she had a son and from whom she separated in 1958. The marriage with Armando Trovajoliit lasted a little longer, from 1962 to 1969, and also gave him a son, but it would also end in divorce. Legend has it that she loved James Dean , who died even younger than her, aged 23.

With Fernandel, he made Mademoiselle Nitouche (1954) in French, and was in Paul Newman ‘s screen debut, The Silver Chalice , in the same year. She reunited with the charismatic star in the boxing drama Marked by Hate ( Robert Wise , 1956). From here the decline gradually begins. He does Crazy for the Circus (1958) together with Danny Kaye , and although he is together with Richard Attenborough – SOS, Pacific (1959), Bitter Silence (1960) – and Stewart Granger – Sodom and Gomorrah (1962) -, they are not memorable films . His presence is fleeting inThe Battle of the Bulge (1965), and little needs to be said about his intervention in spaghetti-westerns such as A Thousand Dollars a Day (1968), not to mention his appearance in the erotic scary film Las demoniadas (1970). He closes his filmography with a half-baked science fiction film, Octoman (1976), released after his premature death.