Claudia Mori - actress and singer

Film star who married pop icon Adriano Celentano

Claudia Mori is half of what was at one time
Italy's golden celebrity couple

The actress, singer and later television producer Claudia Mori, married for more than half a century to Italy’s all-time biggest-selling recording artist, Adriano Celentano, was born on this day in 1944 in Rome.

She and Celentano met in 1963 on the set of Uno strano tipo (A Strange Type) a comedy film in which they were both starring. The two were married the following year at the Church of San Francesco in Grosseto in Tuscany, having kept their intentions secret to avoid publicity.

Mori was only 20 when she and Celentano - six years her senior - were married but she had already made several films.

Born Claudia Moroni, she made her film debut in Raffaello Matarazzo’s romantic comedy Cerasella at the age of just 15 in 1959, featuring as the title character opposite Mario Girotti, the actor who would later change his name to Terence Hill and become famous as the parish priest Don Matteo in the long-running television series of the same name.

The following year she had a supporting part a laundry worker colleague of Alain Delon in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers) and over the next two years played another supporting part in the Robert Aldrich’s biblical epic Sodom and Gomorrah, starring Stewart Granger and Pier Angeli, as well as co-starring as a beautiful princess in Giorgio Simonelli’s Ursus nella terra di fuoco (Ursus in the Land of Fire). 

A 15-year-old Mori on the beach at Vietri-sul-Mare with
co-star Mario Girotti during her movie debut in 1959

In 1964, she co-starred with her new husband in Super rapina a Milano (Super-robbery in Milan), the first film Celentano also directed.

At the same time, she was developing a singing career, releasing her first record - Non guardarmi (Don’t look at me) - in 1964.  Her career was boosted by teaming up with Celentano in a number of duets, notably with Chi non-lavora non-fa l'amore (Those who don't work don't make love), with which they won the 1970 Sanremo Festival.

In the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Mori alternated between acting and singing. More movie success came with Rugantino, L’emigrante (The Emigrant) and Culastrisce Nobile Veneziano (released in the United States as Lunatics and Lovers), in which she starred opposite Marcello Mastroianni. 

All were comedies, as was Yuppi Du, the 1975 movie in which she again starred with Celentano, who also directed the film. The English actress Charlotte Rampling was among her co-stars and the film was an Italian entry at the Cannes Film Festival.

Claudia Mori and Adriano Celentano
celebrate their 1970 Sanremo victory

During the same decade, Mori enjoyed her biggest solo recording success with Buonasera Dottore.  She became CEO of her husband’s record label, Clan Celentano, producing her husband's celebrated album of duets with Mina, Italy’s all-time biggest selling female artist, which sold more than two million copies.

Celentano himself - now 81 - can look back on a career in which he has sold in excess of 200 million records, well ahead of any other Italian recording artist.

More recently, Mori developed a television career. She was a judge on the Italian version of The X-Factor and her television production company Ciao ragazzi (Hello Boys) has turned out several successful mini-series of drama and drama-documentary films.

She and Celentano are still together, although they separated for a period in the 1980s following Celentano’s affair with another actress.  They had three children, Rosita, Giacomo and Rosalinda. Rosita is a television presenter, Rosalinda an actress.

Positano, with its dramatic cliffside setting, is one of
the jewels of the Amalfi Coast

Travel tip:

Claudia Mori’s debut movie Cerasella was filmed on location in Naples and on the Amalfi Coast, the 50km (31 miles) stretch of Campania coastline between the southern side of the Sorrentine Peninsula and Vietri-sul-Mare, the resort just outside Salerno. Notable for its steep cliffs and rocky inlets and coves, with a winding road that seems to cling to the cliff face, the area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site comprising a string of villages and towns, the most famous of which are Positano, Amalfi and Ravello. The town of Amalfi, which occupies a dramatic setting at the foot of the cliffs, attracts huge numbers of visitors each year. Its ninth-century Duomo dominates the town's central piazza, sitting at the top of a wide flight of steps.

Find accommodation in Amalfi with Booking.com

Galbiate, where Claudia Mori and Adriano Celentano have
a house, has views over Lago di Annone

Travel tip:

Mori and Celentano’s main home is in Galbiate, a small town in Lombardy about 50km (31 miles) northeast of Celentano’s home city of Milan and close to the small lakeside city of Lecco. Galbiate is close to Lago di Annone and Lago di Garlate, two small lakes to the south of Lake Como.  The area between the lakes includes the Natural Park of Monte Barro, which is the home of more than 1,000 varieties of plants in a climate of biodiversity probably unique in Lombardy. The area is also the habitat of birds of prey such as the the kestrel, buzzard, brown kite and peregrine falcon and the rare royal albanella.

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More reading:

How Adriano Celentano became Italy's biggest selling pop star of all time

Terence Hill - from spaghetti westerns to parish priest

Luchino Visconti, the aristocrat of Italian cinema

Also on this day:

1602: The birth of Baroque painter Michelangelo Cerquozzi

1799: The death of Lazzaro Spallanzani, biologist who pioneered artificial insemination

1923: The birth of film director Franco Zeffirelli

(Picture credits: Positano by Glen MacLarty; Lago di Annone by Cantakukuruz; via Wikimedia Commons)

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Marisa Pavan - actress

Twin sister of tragic star Pier Angeli

Marisa Pavan (left) with Anna
Magnani in The Rose Tattoo

The actress Marisa Pavan, whose twin sister Pier Angeli was a Hollywood star in the 1950s and 1960s, was born on this day in 1932 as Maria Luisa Pierangeli in Cagliari, Sardinia.

Pavan’s career ran parallel with that of her sister, who was born 20 minutes before her, but she rejected the re-invention as an ultra-glamorous starlet that Pier Angeli underwent within the Hollywood studio system.

She turned roles down when she felt they did not have enough substance and did not hesitate to sack agents if she felt they were putting her forward for unsuitable parts.  She refused to sign up to any one studio.

Her biggest success was The Rose Tattoo, the 1955 film adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play in which she played the daughter of the central character, played by Anna Magnani, one of postwar Italian cinema’s most respected actresses.

Magnani won an Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of a Sicilian widow, with Pavan receiving a nomination for best supporting actress at the Academy Awards and although that award went to someone else she did have the substantial compensation of winning a Golden Globe for the role.

The Pierangeli family had left Sardinia for Rome when the twins were three years old as their father, Luigi, pursued his career as an architect. Life began to change for the family in 1948 when her sister, then still known by her real name, Anna Maria Pierangeli, was approached by the famous actor and director, Vittorio De Sica, while walking along fashionable Via Veneto, and asked if she might be interested in a part.

Pavan with her husband, the French actor
Jean-Pierre Aumont, in 1965

She won an award at the Venice Film Festival for the role De Sica gave her and it was not long before the twins, their younger sister Patrizia and their mother were leaving for the United States to support Anna Maria’s new career in Hollywood. The only sadness was that they travelled without the girls’ father, Luigi, who had died a short time before they were due to leave.

Marisa, who had always been more studious than her sister, had no intention of becoming an actress herself, devoting herself to studying languages and journalism.  She nonetheless did follow Anna into the movie business, but only after claiming she was ‘tricked’ into an audition by the producer Albert Romolo ‘Cubby’ Broccoli.

Broccoli invited her to look round the Twentieth Century Fox studios and while visiting one set he gave her a costume to try on and asked her if she would like to show off her language skills by singing a song in French. Thinking it was just for fun she obliged.

The penny dropped only when she spotted an actress she recognised, Anne Bancroft, wearing the same costume. It turned out that among a small number of people on the set was the director John Ford, who hired her for a part in his 1952 comedy drama, What Price Glory, starring James Cagney and Corinne Calvet.

Although she agreed to have a shorter, catchier name for professional purposes - she chose Pavan after a Jewish soldier her family hid from the authorities during the Second World War - that was one of the few ways in her career resembled that of Pier Angeli.

Marisa Pavan has campaigned for
Alzheimer's research in recent years

Always keen to take parts that demanded something of her acting ability, she played a blind American woman in Down Three Dark Streets (1954), a Native American girl in Drum Beat (1954), the Italian noblewoman Catherine de’ Medici in Diane (1956), a French lady at the Court of Louis XVI in John Paul Jones (1959) and a Jewish woman in ancient Israel in Solomon and Sheba (1959).

Married in Santa Barbara in 1956 to the French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont, she raised two sons, Jean-Claude and Patrick, while continuing to act, diversifying into television in the 1960s and 1970s.

After the tragedy of Pier Angeli’s death from a barbiturates overdose in 1971, which continued to work, but increasingly in France, after she and her husband moved to Gassin, in the South of France.

Once her career was effectively over, she devoted much time to URMA (Unis pour la Recherche sur la Maladie d'Alzheimer), an organisation she created to support and finance research laboratories working to find treatments for Alzheimer’s.

She remained close to her sister Patrizia, also an actress, who worked in Paris dubbing movies. Her husband died in 2001.

The old town of Castello stands above modern Cagliari

Travel tip:

Cagliari is Sardinia’s main port and an industrial centre it is now also a popular tourist destination, with tree-lined boulevards and a charming historic centre, known as Castello, with limestone buildings that prompted DH Lawrence, whose first view of the city was from the sea as ‘a confusion of domes, palaces and ornamental facades seemingly piled on top of one another’, to call it 'the white Jerusalem'.

The tree-line Via Vittorio Veneto in Rome

Travel tip:

Rome’s Via Vittorio Veneto, more often known simply as the Via Veneto, is traditionally one of the most famous, elegant, and exclusive streets in the city, the home of many expensive hotels and of chic cafes where the famous and those who wanted to be famous would hang out, particularly in the 1950s and 60s. Much of the action in Federico Fellini's classic 1960 film La Dolce Vita took place in the Via Veneto area.  The street was actually named to commemorate a the victory of Italian forces at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto towards the end of the First World War.

More reading:

The brilliance of Oscar winner Anna Magnani

How Fellini became Italy's most famous film director

Marcello Mastroianni - star who immortalised Rome's Trevi Fountain

Also on this day:

1918: The death in action of World War One fighter pilot Francesco Baracca

1932: The birth of Hollywood film star Pier Angeli

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Anna Maria Alberghetti - singer and actress

Child prodigy who rejected Hollywood to become Broadway star

Anna Maria Alberghetti's good looks made
her attractive to movie studios

The actress and operatic singer Anna Maria Alberghetti was born on this day in 1936 in the Adriatic resort of Pesaro.

She moved with her family to the United States in her teens and became a Broadway star, winning a Tony Award in 1962 as best actress in a musical for her performance in Bob Merrill’s Carnival, directed by Gower Champion.

Alberghetti was a child prodigy with music in her blood. Her father was an accomplished musician, an opera singer and concert master of the Rome Opera Company, who also played the cello. Her mother was a pianist.

They influenced the direction in which her talent developed and by the age of six she was singing with symphony orchestras with her father as her vocal instructor.

After success touring Europe, Anna Maria was invited to perform in the United States and made her debut at Carnegie Hall in New York at the age of 14. Given the state of Italy after the Second World War, the idea of settling permanently in America became too attractive for the family to resist.

Alberghetti in an early publicity shot
for the MGM studios

At that time, Anna Maria’s focus was on a career as an opera singer but the American cinema industry was obsessed with European actresses and saw in her someone with the same qualities as her contemporary Anna MariaPierangeli, the beautiful actress from Sardinia who became better known as Pier Angeli.

Paramount was the studio that showed the most interest, foreseeing a bright future for her on screen.  She made her debut in the hypnotic Gian Carlo Menotti's chamber opera The Medium in 1951. It was an art-house movie that was well appreciated by the devotees of that genre but Paramount had bigger plans for their new discovery.

However, her talent was used strangely used. After an extended operatic solo in the Bing Crosby comedy Here Comes the Groom (1951), she played a Polish émigré befriended by a singer (played by Rosemary Clooney) who discovers the girl has musical talent of her own in The Stars Are Singing (1953).

But thereafter, her vocals were required less and less as Paramount pushed her towards mainstream parts, casting her in adventure stories and comedies. It was not a path she wanted to follow and after being cast in the Jerry Lewis farce Cinderfella (1960), in which all the songs were sung by Lewis and none by her, she became disillusioned and quit cinema to seek expression on the Broadway stage.

It was on Broadway that she found stardom, landing the part of Lili in the musical Carnival for which she received outstanding reviews. Her delightful and moving performance was rewarded with the Tony Award.

Alberghetti in the Broadway hit Carnival
which established her stardom

More success followed in the title role in Fanny (1963), Maria in West Side Story (1964), Marsinah in Kismet (1967) and Luisa in The Fantasticks (1968), to name just a few. 

Via the Ed Sullivan TV show, she became a familiar face – and voice - to millions of American households and appearances in other TV shows followed, as well as a recording career.

She often figured in the gossip pages of newspapers and magazines after romantic associations with a number of famous figures in the entertainment world, including the singer Vic Damone, the actors Bob Wagner  and Dick Contino and Count Alberto Mochiand, a 30-year-old Italian doctor who bought her a pearl and diamond engagement ring.

She was briefly engaged to the producer-composer Buddy Bregman but cancelled the wedding plans and began dating Claudio Guzman, the Chile-born television director, whom she married in September 1964. They had two children, Alexander, Pilar, but divorced in 1972.  

Travel tip:

Pesaro, in the Marche region on Italy's Adriatic coast, is a traditional seaside resort blessed with sandy beaches, particularly popular with Italians. Situated to the north of the region, it is around 40km (25 miles) south of the better known resort of Rimini and represents an interesting alternative, although with a population of 95,000 it is by no means a quiet backwater. A feature, too, is its many cycle paths, which earned Pesaro the nickname City of Bicycles.

Rossini's birthplace is now a museum

Travel tip:

The older part of Pesaro, inland from the grid of streets parallel with the shoreline where most of the hotels and holiday apartments are situated, has no shortage of history.  Look out for the Ducal Palace and Rocca Costanza, the palace and castle built by the Sforza family in the 15^th century and the 16^th century Villa Imperiale, built in the 16^th century for Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere and his wife.  The Piazza del Popolo is a pleasant main square where there is a regular market. The town’s most famous son, the opera composer Gioachino Rossini, is commemorated in many ways, in particular with the a museum at his birthplace in what is now Via Rossini and the Conservatorio Statale di Musica in Piazza Oliveri.

More reading:

Rossini's legacy to Pesaro

Pier Angeli - talented actress who died tragically young

How screen siren Virna Lisi turned her back on glamour roles

Also on this day:

1567: Composer Claudio Monteverdi baptised

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Pier Angeli - Hollywood star

Actress hailed for talent and beauty died tragically young

Anna Maria Pierangeli, the actress who
 became known as Pier Angeli

The actress Pier Angeli, a Hollywood star in the 1950s and 60s, was born on this day in 1932 in Cagliari, Sardinia.

She won awards in Italy and in America at the start of her career, when she was likened by some critics to the Swedish-born star Greta Garbo.

Described by the actor Paul Newman as "the most beautiful Italian actress of the century", Angeli was also a fixture in the gossip columns.  Linked romantically with a number of Hollywood's leading male actors, she dated Kirk Douglas and became close to the celebrated 'rebel' James Dean before marrying another star, the Italian-American actor and singer, Vic Damone.

It would be the first of two marriages.  She had a son, Perry, with Damone but they divorced after four years.  A second marriage, to the Italian composer, Armando Trovaioli, produced another son, Andrew, but they also divorced.

Born Anna Maria Pierangeli, the daughter of an architect, she had a twin sister, Maria Luisa, who would also become an actress.  Her mother, Enrica, used to dress the girls to resemble the American child star, Shirley Temple. The family moved to Rome when she was three.

Her mother wasted little time in enrolling the girls for stage school as soon as they were old enough and Anna Maria was only 16 when she enjoyed the big break that would shape her career.  Hanging out on the fashionable Via Veneto, she was spotted by the Italian actor, Vittorio de Sica, and recommended for a role in his upcoming film, Domani e Troppo Tardi (Tomorrow is Too Late).

Playing the part of Marisa in a tale of two star-crossed adolescent lovers, she won the Best Actress award from the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists.  Soon, Hollywood beckoned.

Again, she was a hit from the start, winning a Golden Globe for Most Promising Female Newcomer for her MGM debut movie Teresa, in which she played the title role and which saw Rod Steiger and John Ericson also make their debuts.  Renamed Pier Angeli by the MGM producer Arthur Loew, it was her performance in this film - much of it shot on location in Rome - that brought comparisons with Greta Garbo.

James Dean, the American actor with whom
Pier Angeli had a relationship

As offers of parts began to flow, so the gossip columnists began to follow Pier Angeli's every move. She was linked with numerous actors, including Marlon Brando, before settling into a year-long relationship with Kirk Douglas after they met while filming The Story of Three Loves.

Douglas was more than 15 years older than Angeli, however, and though they become engaged they eventually broke up, despite a number of attempted reconciliations.

Angeli met James Dean while making The Silver Chalice, in which Paul Newman made his screen debut.  Newman was visited on set by Dean, another young American who was simultaneously filming his debut movie, East of Eden.  The pretty young Italian actress caught his eye and they hit it off immediately.

By now, Angeli's family had moved to California and though she and Dean became inseparable, her mother disapproved of the relationship, preferring the charming Damone, whom Angeli has dated before and had the advantage - in her mother's eyes - of being a Catholic from a New York Italian family.

It is said that Angeli would have married Dean had he proposed, but he was reluctant to commit. He was still inclined to act on impulses. When he announced, suddenly, that he was going to New York and did not return for two weeks, her mother persuaded Pier that he was unreliable and she terminated their relationship.  Soon afterwards, she accepted a proposal from Damone.

In the best melodramatic tradition of screen romances, Dean is said to have sat outside on his motorcycle while the wedding was taking place in a church in Beverley Hills, speeding away noisily as the couple emerged.  Later, after the failure of her second marriage, Angeli confessed that Dean, who would be killed in a road accident a year later, had been the true love of her life.

With painful irony, Angeli would win plaudits in 1956 for Somebody Up There Likes Me, playing the wife of Paul Newman, who took the role of the prize fighter Rocky Graziano that had originally been earmarked for Dean.

Her career at the top was not over.  In 1960 she was nominated for a BAFTA as best foreign actress for her performance alongside Richard Attenborough in the British film The Angry Silence and starred with Stewart Granger in the Biblical epic Sodom and Gomorrah.

Pier Angeli died in 1971 in tragic circumstances at the age of just 39, in an apartment belonging to her former acting coach in Beverley Hills. She had been receiving treatment for a stomach disorder but her death was from an overdose of barbiturates.

Travel tip:

Sardinia's fascinating capital, Cagliari, combines fragments of the past – spanning Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, Spanish and Italian eras – with 21st-century cosmopolitanism.  Visitors should concentrate first on the Castello district, the medieval heart of the city built on top of a hill with a view of the Gulf of Cagliari. Built from local white limestone, most of the city walls remain intact and include two towers that survive from the early 14th century.

The Westin Excelsior Hotel on Rome's Via Veneto

Travel tip: 

Rome's Via Vittorio Veneto, commonly known as the Via Veneto, is one of the capital's most famous, elegant and expensive streets. The street is named after the 1918 Battle of Vittorio Veneto, a decisive Italian victory of World War I, and immortalised by Federico Fellini's 1960 film La Dolce Vita, which celebrated its heyday in the '50s and '60s when its bars and restaurants attracted Hollywood stars and jet set personalities.  Some of Rome's most renowned cafés and five star hotels, such as Café de Paris, Harry's Bar, the Regina Hotel Baglioni and the Westin Excelsior are located in Via Veneto.

More reading:

Roberto Rossellini - pioneer of neo-realism

Federico Fellini - great 20th century filmmaker

Rudolph Valentino - tragic star of silent movies


(Photo of Via Veneto by Gobbler CC BY-SA 3.0)

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