Mourning in Italy over the death of Gina Lollobrigida 0:28
(CNN) — Italian screen legend Gina Lollobrigida has died at the age of 95, the Italian news agency ANSA reported on Monday, citing relatives.
Her grandnephew, Italy’s Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida, tweeted the news of her death, calling her “one of the brightest stars of Italian cinema and culture.”
The state media Rai also reported on his death.
Gina Lollobrigida in a promotional portrait for the 1954 film Woman from Rome. (Credit: Distributor Corporation of America/Getty Images)
Lollobrigida starred in Bread, Love and Dreams, The Unruly Woman and Woman from Rome. Along with Sophia Loren, she became a symbol of Italian actresses in the 1950s and 1960s.
After training as a painter and sculptor, Lollobrigida became a successful beauty queen and model before making her film debut in 1946 with a small role in the swashbuckling adventure The Black Eagle.
In the early 1950s he was a big star in Europe. He made his English language film debut in 1953 in John Huston’s Beat the Devil, opposite Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones.
Gina Lollobrigida and Rock Hudson in Come September (1961). (Image credit: Everett Collection)
She was Esmeralda for Anthony Quinn’s Quasimodo in the 1956 adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Queen of Sheba for Yul Brynner’s King Solomon in King Vidor’s 1959 Technicolor epic Solomon and Sheba.
As film reels began to dwindle in the 1970s, Lollobrigida made a new career as a photojournalist. He has appeared occasionally in films and on television, most famously in a recurring role on the 1984 American prime-time soap opera Falcon Crest.
Last year she ran unsuccessfully for a seat in Italy’s Senate, telling the Corriere della Sera newspaper ahead of the country’s elections: “I got tired of listening to politicians arguing among themselves without getting to the point.”