Cinema and theatre actress Valentina
Cortese died Wednesday in Milan at the age of 86.
"With the passing of Vslentina Cortese Italian show business
loses that last diva of the cinema and theatre," said Carlo
Fontana, head of the Italian Show Business Association.
Cortese was nominated for the Academy Award for Best
Supporting Actress for her performance in François Truffaut's
Day for Night (1973).
Born in Milan to a family from Stresa (Piedmont), Cortese
married Richard Basehart, her co-star in The House on Telegraph
Hill, in 1951, and had one son with him, the actor Jackie
Basehart; they divorced in 1960.
She never remarried. Jackie Basehart died in Milan in 2015,
predeceasing Cortese.
She made her screen debut in Italian films in 1940, leading
to her first internationally acclaimed roles in Riccardo Freda's
1948 Italian film Les Misérables with Gino Cervi and a very
young Marcello Mastroianni, in which she played both Fantine and
Cosette, and the 1949 British film The Glass Mountain (1949),
which led to a number of roles in American films of the period,
but continued to make films in Europe with such directors as
Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and François Truffaut.
She signed a contract with 20th Century Fox in 1948. She
starred in Malaya (1949), a Second World War film about
smuggling and guerrilla warfare against the Japanese with
Spencer Tracy and James Stewart, Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway
(1949) with Richard Conte and Lee J. Cobb, The House on
Telegraph Hill (1951) directed by Robert Wise and co-starring
Richard Basehart and William Lundigan, and Joseph L.
Mankiewicz's The Barefoot Contessa (1954), with Humphrey Bogart,
Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien.
In Europe she starred in Michelangelo Antonioni's Le Amiche
(1955), Gérard Brach's The Boat on the Grass (1971), Terry
Gilliam's British film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
(1988), and in Franco Zeffirelli projects such as the film
Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), the miniseries Jesus of
Nazareth (1977) and the film Sparrow (1993). Her final American
film role was in When Time Ran Out (1980)
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