Monday, September 17, 2012

Miss Italy of 1946

Silvana Pampanini--b. 1925 and apparently still alive--Italian movie star and 'sex symbol' of the early fifties.  Here she is in O.K. Nerone (1951), described in the caption of this publicity photo as 'An American-Language Comedy Spectacle.'  Silvana's Wikipedia entry--badly translated, it seems, from the Italian--is likewise something of an American-language comedy spectacle.  She is described as having refused an invitation to make films in Hollywood because she "found English too difficult and because she had some problems about tax office."

Likewise fascinating: "In the opinion of the press, she filtered with personalities as Tyrone Power, William Holden, Orson Welles, Omar Sharif, George DeWitt, Jimenez and Fidel Castro; despite of this she never married." You can see her filtering here, but also why she found the mens disappointing.