Celebrity Biographies
Virna lisi
The Italian Marilyn Monroe, Virna Lisi, was in business for more than four decades. Although at the beginning of her career she only played beauties, without much depth, she worked hard to become a convincing and serious performer. The actress died in Rome at the age of 78, on December 18, 2014, as a result of cancer that was diagnosed only a month before. She announced the sad event Corrado, her son.
Born on November 8, 1936, in Jesi, a town in Ancona, in central Italy, Virna Piealisi (her real name) stood out for her beauty when she was barely a teenager. She became very famous in Italy when the Chlorodont toothpaste brand recruited her for an advertisement that dazzled Italians in the 50s, who at that time gathered en masse in the houses of the few neighbors who had televisions. She played a woman who was silenced by her husband, and she responded that she had said something wrong, smiling with extremely white teeth. “With that mouth she can say whatever she wants,” the campaign slogan stated.
Shortly after, Virna Lisi established herself in the cinema with the film Rómulo y Remo, and began shooting numerous European titles, such as Eva , by Joseph Losey , and the adventure production partially shot in Spain El tulipán negro , where she shared the screen with Alain Delon . She also starred in Pietro Germi ‘s Ladies and Gentlemen , which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Claimed by Hollywood, she turned down becoming a Bond Girl, with Sean Connery in From Russia with Love . But in the mid-’60s she moved to the movie mecca, where the producers tried to make her the replacement for the recently deceased Marilyn Monroe . In fact, she embodied a character very much in line with the blonde temptation, in How to Kill Your Own Wife , where she embodied the scene most remembered by moviegoers, when she came out of a cake to surprise Jack Lemmon .
But after turning down several offers to strip in various magazines, she grew tired of “being treated like a doll,” she said in an interview in the Roman daily Il Messagero. “When I decided that was over, my real acting career began,” she said. “I was fed up with shortcuts. The directors wondered: Is a pretty one serving? Well, call Lisi. But the important thing in life is personal effort.” She decided to return to Europe, and choose more complex roles, such as Elizabeth, Friedrich Nietsche’s sister, in Liliana Cavani ‘s Beyond Good and Evil . For her role as Catherine de Medici, in Queen Margot , from 1994, she won the best actress award at Cannes.