Gina Lollobrigida, sultry and prolific actress who was acclaimed as one of the world’s most beautiful women – obituary

Gina Lollobrigida, who has died aged 95, was the first Italian film actress to gain a reputation as a post-war international sex symbol; with her ample charms and expression of smouldering disdain she gained instant popularity after her 1949 screen debut in Miss Italy; she soon earned the various sobriquets “La Lollo”, the “temptress of the Tiber”, the “Italian Jayne Mansfield” and, in her own country, the busto provocante, a reflection of the impact of her 35-22-36 figure.

Gina Lollobrigida was extremely hard-working and appeared in scores of films. She was keen to co-operate with directors and would often memorise scripts fully in advance. But in spite of her professionalism she was said to lack screen presence.

This may in part have been due to her practicality. Efficient competence left little room for the vulnerability or fiery intensity that characterises many true heroines.

But with the help of her Yugoslavian-born husband and manager, Milko Skofic, she was aggressive in marketing her talents. Howard Hughes was said to have “discovered” her after seeing provocative pictures of her, bikini-clad, which her husband had allowed to be placed in a magazine.

Gina Lollobrigida filed every cutting that appeared about her in a neat scrapbook, and did not respond well to criticism. Fierce in protecting her reputation, she became litigious at the drop of a hat.

She sued for the return of film stills from The World’s Most Beautiful Woman (1955), in which, while dancing the can-can, flashlights had rendered her nylon “scanties” almost non-existent; she took a New York restaurant to court after biting into a hard object and losing part of a tooth, which brought her $72,000 in compensation; and she took legal action against a newspaper in Rome which had reported that she appeared virtually naked in one of her films. “That’s not so,” her husband retorted, “she wore a trench coat.”

A year rarely passed when she was not pursuing litigation of one sort or another. In 1955, when she was conducting four lawsuits simultaneously, she told reporters, “I am the most quiet girl in the world, but if anyone want to make trouble for me. . .”, completing her sentence with the gesture of grinding her foot into the carpet, as if to crush some loathsome insect.

Gina Lollobrigida was canny enough to know when to forbear from parts which depended solely on sexual allure, and from the early 1970s became a photographer, displaying considerable talent. One book of her work, Italia Mia, featured for several months in the American bestseller list.

Her subjects included Neil Armstrong, Henry Kissinger and Fidel Castro, whom she photographed in 1975, and with whom she professed to have a “meeting of minds”. Their mutual admiration was demonstrated when they exchanged watches – her diamond-encrusted Piaget for his Seiko, which he engraved “To Gina, with admiration, Fidel Castro”. Ten years later she was invited back to Cuba to take his official photograph.

A furniture maker’s daughter, Luigina Lollobrigida was born at Subiaco, Italy, on July 4 1927. Her schooling was supplemented by private lessons in singing, dancing, languages and drawing; during the Second World War the family fled to Rome after Allied air attacks destroyed their home and factory, and young Gina supplemented their income sketching portraits of American GIs and posing for photostrips known as fumetti.

After the liberation of Rome she took up singing again, and for three years studied sculpture and painting while on a scholarship to Rome’s Academy of Fine Arts.

Gina Lollobrigida was well aware of her sultry beauty and impressive hourglass figure, but had not intended to trade on it for a career – with a typically practical approach she had been working towards becoming a commercial artist.

In 1947, though, she entered for the Miss Rome contest and won, becoming a runner-up for the title of Miss Italy. The same year she was spotted in the street by the Italian film director Mario Costa, and began work as a film extra. She was soon elevated to the position of stand-in, but was thwarted, she claimed, because the actress she was impersonating was jealous of her.

Two years later she played a beauty contestant in her first film, Miss Italy. A further coincidence occurred later in life when she was sued by the director Michelangelo Antonioni for breaking a contract to appear in a film after reading the script – she discovered she was to play a former beauty contestant who becomes a celebrated screen actress in spite of a marked lack of acting ability.

After her first film release she was summoned to RKO in Hollywood for a screen test with Howard Hughes. She spent six weeks at the studios being coached in English, until she was thoroughly sick of “horrible RKO pictures”.

Gina Lollobrigida managed to win freedom from the seven-year contract she had signed on the grounds that she had not understood its implications. But Hughes, who as part of the agreement retained an option on her work, exercised his revenge by preventing her from working in Hollywood until 1959 (though she could work on American films shot abroad). She later claimed that Hughes had tried to force her to divorce her husband and marry him.

She returned to Italy and, in 1953, attracted international attention for her part as the luscious daughter of a recruiting sergeant in the French farce Fanfan the Tulip. The same year she played Humphrey Bogart’s wife in Beat the Devil. Two years later she played that Italian soprano Lina Cavalieri in The World’s Most Beautiful Woman, a part for which she did her own singing.

Relentlessly industrious, Gina Lollobrigida often made a film a month during the 1950s and into the 1960s, including Beauties of the Night (1952), The Unfaithful, Bread, Love and Dreams (both 1953), Crossed Swords, Card of Fate, Bread, Love and Jealousy (all 1954), Trapeze, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (both 1956), Anna of Brooklyn (1958), The Law, Solomon and Sheba, Never So Few (all 1959) and Go Naked in the World (1961).

With Jane Russell, in 1954, she earned praise from the Vatican: Gina Lollobrigida had refused to act in a film that required her to bare too much flesh for her liking, and Russell had praised censors who had cut one of her films.

But the Roman Catholic Church was not always so complimentary. By 1955 Gina Lollobrigida and her husband were living in a 10-roomed pink villa in Rome’s Via Appia. They drove about in a red Lancia and the house was lavishly decorated in the style of Sicilian baroque. When, that year, she demanded £250,000 for a film the Vatican pronounced it “immoral” to earn that amount.

Her demands for high payments also led to trouble with the Italian inland revenue. When news of a tax probe into her affairs was announced, a tax man explained to the waiting press: “If a film queen admits in her return to an income of, say, 30 million lire, and then is imprudent enough to sue a producer for double that as an advance on her fees for making one film, her entire tax situation will be reviewed.”

The mid-1950s also saw the beginning of a long-running feud between Gina Lollobrigida and a new rival, her compatriot Sophia Loren. Continual newspaper reports comparing their vital statistics were denounced as “ridiculous” by La Lollo, but she was undeniably miffed. When, in 1955, Gina Lollobrigida declined to appear in another of the lucrative series Bread, Love and. . ., Loren assumed the mantle, appearing on a donkey in a similar state of deshabillé to an equally warm reception.

“We are as different,” Gina Lollobrigida said, “as a fine racehorse and a goat.”

Two years later she announced that she was to have a baby. Her popularity was such that news of her pregnancy was avidly updated in the British and international press until her son, Milko, was born.

Her career continued, with the focus shifted to more serious parts. There were, though, some lengths to which she would not go. In 1959 she was due to appear in a film about the treatment of Yugoslav girls accused of collaboration with the Nazis. When she discovered that her part entailed having her head shaved she dropped out, claiming to have had a nervous breakdown.

In 1960 Gina Lollobrigida and her husband emigrated to Canada, ostensibly because her husband (who had been denied Italian citizenship) was suffering through being a “man without a state”. The same year she announced plans for her imminent retirement.

A year later they left their Toronto home for California. “I hope no one will think too hard of us,” she told reporters. “My work will not make it possible for us to become Canadian citizens in the fullest sense.”

In 1965 California state officials seized her jewellery, in recompense, they claimed, for £4,000 worth of unpaid taxes. “I never knew I owed any taxes in California,” she remonstrated. “Even the Mafia gives at least one warning.”

When, soon afterwards, she appeared on Bob Hope’s television show, he borrowed £300,000 of jewels on her behalf to prevent her, in her own words, from feeling naked.

The same year Gina Lollobrigida went on trial in Italy, accused of acting in the nude in the film The Dolls. Her defence rested on the claim that she was wearing flesh-coloured tights. Along with the French actor Jean Sorel she was convicted of obscenity and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment and a fine of £22. (Both punishments were suspended, and in 1967 an appeal was upheld and the conviction changed to the more minor charge of “performing contrary to public decency”.)

Her name was romantically linked with President Sukarno of Indonesia, and the South African heart-transplant surgeon Christiaan Barnard. She later branded Barnard “an idiot” and a “cheap publicity seeker”, and sued his wife for publishing love letters Gina Lollobrigida had written to him.

She separated from her husband, relatively amicably, in 1971.

Her interest in photography grew, and in 1973 she published Italia Mia, a book of photographs she took travelling around Italy incognito. The book was very well received by critics and the public alike.

But the public was less enamoured with Gina Lollobrigida when she arrived in London sporting a tiger-skin coat – one of a selection of seven coats which the World Wildlife Fund estimated had consumed the skins of some 250 animals. The tiger coat, said the charity, must have been made of at least 10 skins. “There are only 600 tigers left in the world,” said a spokesman, “so one woman is wearing one 60th of the world’s tiger population.”

Gina Lollobrigida dissented. The coat had taken “only” three tigers to make, she said, dismissing any protests about endangered wildlife as nonsensical. “What can I do?” she asked. “The tigers in my coat were already dead. I didn’t kill anything. Anyway, the coats keep you warm. You might as well stop killing chickens for meat – it’s the same thing.”

In 1984 she experienced a brief rejuvenation of her acting career, appearing in the American television drama Falcon’s Crest and in The Rose Tattoo on Broadway.

Fiercely proud of being an Italian, she was also a committed European, and in 1992 declared herself fully in favour of the Maastricht Treaty. In 1999 she ran unsuccessfully for the European Parliament, representing Romano Prodi’s Democrats party, and aged 95 she ran, unsuccessfully again, for the Italian Senate.

After divorcing her first husband, Gina Lollobrigida reportedly married a Spanish businessman 34 years her junior, Javier Rigau y Rafols, in 2006, though she later disputed this in court.

She is survived by her son.

Gina Lollobrigida, born July 4 1927, died January 16 2023