Clara Calamai - actress

Star remembered for groundbreaking moments in Italian cinema history

Clara Calamai enjoyed huge popularity with
Italian cinema audiences in the '30s and '40s

The actress Clara Calamai, best known for two Italian cinema classics of the 1940s and for a cult 1970s horror film, died in the Adriatic resort of Rimini on this day in 1998, at the age of 89.

Calamai’s career is generally seen to have peaked with her appearances in Luchino Visconti’s 1943 crime drama Ossessione and, three years later, in Duilio Coletti’s melodrama L’adultera, for which she won a Nastro d’Argento award as best actress.

She scaled down her career drastically after marriage but won fresh acclaim three decades later for her role as Marta, a murderous ageing actress in ‘Master of Horror’ Dario Argento’s box office smash Profondo Rosso.

For many years, Calamai was also known as the first woman to bare her breasts in Italian cinema - in a 1942 movie that not surprisingly caused scandal at the time - although it was later accepted that another actress, Vittoria Carpi, had beaten her to that claim to fame. 

Calamai, sometimes known as Clara Mais, was born in the Tuscany city of Prato, about 25km (16 miles) northwest of Florence, in 1909. She had two sisters, Vittorina and Paola, yet little is known about her early life before her big screen debut in Aldo Vergano’s 1938 historical epic, Pietro Micca.

She made a good living by accepting multiple parts in what then was a somewhat sanitised Italian film industry, which was regulated so tightly within the guidelines set by the Fascist authorities that approved film-makers were limited mainly to lightweight comedies and heroic costume dramas. 

Calamai in La Cena delle Beffe, a film
largely remembered for her 'nude' scene

Her ‘nude’ scene came relatively early in her career, although it scarcely constituted a scene, occupying just 18 frames of Alessandro Blasetti’s La Cena delle Beffe, a drama set in Renaissance Florence starring Amedeo Nazzari. Although it was so brief that an audience member could literally blink and miss it, the outrage provoked was such that minors under the age of 16 were not permitted to watch.

Despite the furore, the episode did no harm to Calamai’s career and her popularity maintained its upwards trajectory, putting her on a par with actresses such as Alida Valli and Valentina Cortese. It later transpired that Blasetti had already shown Vittoria Carpi's naked breast the previous year in La corona di ferro, although because Carpi was a young comparatively unknown actress, it attracted much less attention.

Indeed, the publicity generated may have helped Calamai land her most famous role, in 1943, when Visconti chose her to replace Anna Magnani, who was pregnant, in Ossessione, his debut film.

Co-written as well as directed by Visconti, the film was an adaptation of the 1934 novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, by the American author, James M Cain. It was the second of seven adaptations of Cain’s novel, although Visconti’s - controversially - was not authorised or even credited.

The film was condemned by the Fascist regime for its unvarnished depictions of Italy’s working class population. But Calamai’s performance as Giovanna, who embarks on an affair with a young hobo and is eventually persuaded to murder her husband, was outstanding and the film is regarded today as a pioneering work of Italian cinema, perhaps the first neorealist film.

Calamai and co-star Massimo Girotti in a scene
from Luchino Visconti's 1943 drama Ossessione

Three years later, in Coletti’s L'adultera, her performance as Velca, a peasant woman who marries a wealthy but elderly landowner and goes on to be the adulteress of the title, resulted in Calamai winning a Nastro d’Argento - silver ribbon - award from Italian film critics as best actress of 1946.

The year before L’adultera’s success, Calamai had married Leonardo Bonzi, a former Italian tennis champion who also competed in bobsleigh at the Olympics. A qualified pilot, Bonzi was from noble stock and could call himself a count, if he so wished. They met when he embarked on a career in film directing and producing.

With the arrival of the first of their two children, Calamai severely limited her acting commitments, taking  parts only sporadically. She and Bonzi divorced in 1961, after which she began to accept invitations from directors she favoured. Her playing of a prostitute in Visconti’s Le notti bianchi reminded cinemagoers of her acting ability. She appeared on television, too, in a Rai adaptation of Henry Fielding’s 18th century novel, Tom Jones.

What turned out to be her final film was hailed as one of her finest. Cast as Marta, an eccentric multiple killer, Calamai’s performance in Dario Argento’s 1975 hit Profondo Rosso - Deep Red - turned her into something of a cult figure among fans of the director’s work. Argento would later describe the film, which starred David Hemmings as the musician who ultimately identified Marta as the murderer, as his greatest work.

Profondo Rosso kept Calamai in the public eye for a number of years but eventually she disappeared from view. After living alone in her home in Rome not far from Termini station, she spent her final years in Rimini, where her sister, Vittorina, had lived since starting a family.

She died there at the age of 89, reportedly following a heart attack. She is buried at the Cimitero Monumentale di Rimini, where the Emilia-Romagna resort’s greatest cinema icon, Federico Fellini, was laid to rest alongside his wife, the actress Giulietta Masina.

The Palazzo Pretorio is one
of Prato's notable buildings

Travel tip:

Prato, a city of just under 200,000 inhabitants, is less than 20 minutes by train from Florence, yet Clara Calamain’s home city is something of an overlooked gem among Tuscany's many attractions. Prato is the home of the Datini archives, a significant collection of late mediaeval documents concerning economic and trade history, produced between 1363 and 1410, as well as many artistic treasures, including frescoes by Filippo Lippi, Paolo Uccello and Agnolo Gaddi inside its Duomo, which has an external pulpit by built by Michelozzo and decorated by Donatello. The Palazzo Pretorio is a building of great beauty, situated in the pretty Piazza del Comune, and there are the ruins of the castle built for the mediaeval emperor and King of Sicily Frederick II.  Prato’s commercial heritage is founded on the textile industry and its growth in the 19th century earned it the nickname the "Manchester of Tuscany".

Rimini's Tempio Malatestiano has frescoes by
Piero della Francesca and paintings by Giotto

Travel tip:

Rimini has become one of the most popular seaside resorts in Europe, with wide sandy beaches and plenty of hotels and restaurants. But it is also a historic town with many interesting things to see. One of Rimini’s most famous sights is the Tempio Malatestiano, a 13th century Gothic church originally built for the Franciscans but which was transformed on the outside in the 15th century and decorated inside with frescoes by Piero della Francesca and works by Giotto and many other artists. Rimini had a role in the unification of Italy in the 19th century. It was there that Joachim Murat, the brother-in-law of Napoleon and King of Naples, issued his Proclamation in 1815, calling for all Italians to unite into a single people and drive out foreigners, namely the Austrians, who occupied large parts of northern Italy at the time. Although Murat was almost certainly acting out of self-interest at the time - he had just declared war on Austria and desperately needed support - the Proclamation is often seen as the opening statement of the Risorgimento.

Also on this day:

1559: The birth of painter and architect Cigoli

1744: The birth of architect Giacamo Quarenghi

1960: The birth of controversial conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan

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Cesare Danova - movie actor

Acclaim came late for Bergamo-born star

Cesare Danova 

The actor Cesare Danova, who appeared in more than 300 films and TV shows over the course of a 45-year career, was born Cesare Deitinger on this day in 1926 in the Lombardy city of Bergamo. 

The son of an Austrian father and an Italian mother, he adopted Danova as his professional name after meeting the film producer, Dino De Laurentiis, in Rome.

De Laurentiis gave him a screen test and was so impressed he immediately cast Danova in the 1947 movie The Captain's Daughter, playing alongside Amedeo Nazzari and Vittorio Gassman.

So began a career that was to see Danova star opposite Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Joseph L Mankiewicz's 1963 hit Cleopatra, opposite Elvis Presley and Ann-Margaret in Viva Las Vegas (1964), alongside Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel in Martin Scorsese's cult movie Mean Streets (1973) and as part of a star-studded cast in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978).

Danova made his big screen debut in 1947 in the film
The Captain's Daughter, starring  Irasema Dilián

In his later years, Danova became a familiar figure on TV screens in America, making appearances in almost all the popular drama series of the 1980s, including Charlie's Angels, Murder, She Wrote, Falcon Crest, Hart to Hart and Mission: Impossible.

He never retired.  Indeed, he had appeared in an episode of In the Heat of the Night shortly before he died in 1992 of a heart attack, aged 66.

Danova was an individual blessed with a wide range of talents. He spoke five languages, was a licensed pilot and a self-taught painter.

Standing 6ft 4ins (1.93m) tall, he was also an accomplished athlete, winning a fencing championship at the age of 15 and playing for the Italian national rugby team at 17. He was a low-handicap golfer, a respectable tennis player, an amateur swimming champion, an expert horseman and polo player, and a master archer.

Danova (left) with Harvey Keitel and Martin Scorsese on the
set of the 1973 cult movie Mean Streets

He might have made a career in professional sport but his parents wanted him to become a doctor.  While studying at Rome University, he became interested in acting, but was determined not to disappoint his parents and pushed himself so hard in his academic work he suffered a nervous breakdown.

It was while he was recuperating that a friend introduced him to De Laurentiis, by then an up-and-coming producer, whose gamble on giving this unknown a part in a prestigious title paid off, launching Danova as a kind of Italian Errol Flynn, cast as the dashing lead in about 20 Italian action-romance movies.

Danova moved to the United States in the 1950s. he had been spotted by MGM when appearing in the German-backed 1955 movie Don Giovanni and signed a long-term contract with the studio in June 1956.

He was touted as a possible Ben-Hur amid stories that director William Wyler had lured him from Europe specifically to be groomed for the lead role in what was a carefully planned epic production. He was talked about as a glamour boy to fill the shoes of Rudolph Valentino.

The original movie poster from
Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets

Danova spoke no English when he arrived in the United States but spent six months learning the language and it seemed certain he would land the role. However, just as filming was about to begin in March 1957, Wyler decided he did not want an actor with an accent and instead chose Charlton Heston. Danova was stunned, believing the role would have made him an international star. Indeed, it won Heston an Oscar for best actor.

Clearly, luck was not always Danova's friend.  When he was given his second chance to break through as a major star, he was cast in Cleopatra as one of a trio of lovers vying for the attention of the glamorous ruler of Egypt alongside Rex Harrison's Julius Caesar and Richard Burton's Marc Antony. He filmed a number of love scenes with Elizabeth Taylor. But after a real-life romance between Taylor and Burton made headlines, the producers decided they needed to exploit the Burton-Taylor chemistry and most of Danova's scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.

Thereafter, the stellar hit he craved never really came about, although he would win acclaim in the 70s as the Mafia Don Giovanni Cappa in Mean Streets, Scorsese's brilliant story about life among the small-time hoods in New York, and as corrupt mayor Carmine DePasto in Animal House. 

Married twice, Danova had two sons, Marco and Fabrizio, by his first wife, Pamela.

The Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo's Piazza Vecchia

Travel tip:

Most visitors to the Lombardy city of Bergamo, where Danova was born, want to spend some time in Piazza Vecchia, the beautiful square at the heart of the Città Alta, the historic city that stands on a hill above Bergamo's more modern metropolis. Features of the square are the 12th century Palazzo della Ragione, which has a beautiful covered staircase to one side, the tall bell tower known as il Campanone, the 14th century Palazzo del Podesta Veneto (the Palace of the Mayor of Venice), which is now part of the University of Bergamo, the white marble Biblioteca Civica, the fountain decorated with white marble lions, which was donated to the city in 1780 by former mayor Alvise Contarini, and the statue of Torquato Tasso, one of the greatest Italian renaissance poets, who was the son of a Bergamo nobleman.

Find a hotel in Bergamo with Hotels.com

The church of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza

Travel tip:

The University of Rome - often referred to as the Sapienza University of Rome or simply La Sapienza, meaning 'knowledge' - was founded in 1303 by Pope Boniface VIII, as a place for  ecclesiastical studies over which he could exert greater control than the already established universities of Bologna and Padua. The first pontifical university, it expanded in the 15th century to include schools of Law, Medicine, Philosophy and Theology. Money raised from a new tax on wine enabled the University to buy a palace, which later housed the Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza church. The University was closed during the sack of Rome in 1527 but reopened by Pope Paul III in 1534. In 1870, La Sapienza ceased to be the papal university and as the university of the capital of Italy became recognised as the country's most prestigious seat of learning. A new modern campus was built in 1935 under the guidance of the architect Marcello Piacentini. 


More reading:

Dino De Laurentiis, the former pasta salesman who helped sell Italian cinema to the world

How Amedeo Nazzari was touted as Italy's Errol Flynn

Why Rossano Brazzi gave up a legal career to go to Hollywood

Also on this day:

1773: The death of architect Luigi Vanvitelli, who built the Royal Palace at Caserta

1869: The birth of sculptor Pietro Canonica

1930: The birth of cycling champion Gastone Nencini

Selected books:

The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide To Italian Film From Its Origins To The Twenty-First Century, by Gian Piero Brunetta

A History of Italian Cinema, by Peter Bondanella and Federico Pacchioni

(Picture credit: Church of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza by Fb78 via Wikimedia Commons)

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Amedeo Nazzari - movie star

Sardinian actor seen as the Errol Flynn of Italian cinema

Amedeo Nazzari in a scene from the 1950s film by
Federico Fellini, Nights of Cabiria

The prolific actor Amedeo Nazzari, who made more than 90 movies and was once one of Italian cinema's biggest box office names, was born on this day in 1907 in Cagliari.

Likened in his prime to the Australian-American star Errol Flynn, with whom he had physical similarities and the same screen presence, Nazzari enjoyed a career spanning five decades.

One of his first major successes, in the title role of the 1938 drama Luciano Serra, Pilot, in which he played a First World War veteran, established him as Italy's leading male star in 1930s and he maintained his popularity in the 40s and 50s.

He is remembered also for his appearance in Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, which won the 1957 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film.

Towards the end of his career, he featured in Henri Verneuil's 1969 Mafia caper The Sicilian Clan, for which the score was composed by Ennio Morricone.  His last big screen appearance came in 1976 in A Matter of Time, an Italian-American musical fantasy directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring his daughter, Liza Minnelli.

Nazzari was born Amedeo Carlo Leone Buffa, the son of a pasta manufacturer, Salvatore Buffa, and Argenide Nazzari, who was the daughter of the President of the Court of Appeal in Cagliari, Amedeo Nazzari, whose name he decided to take as his stage name.

The poster advertising Nazzari's first
big success, Luciano Serra, Pilot

Salvatore Buffa died when Amedeo was only six and the family moved to Rome, where his mother guided him through his teenage years and hoped he would develop a career as an engineer. After joining a drama society, however, Amedeo became infatuated with theatre and, ultimately, cinema.

After the death of Rudolph Valentino, the movie sex symbol of the 1920s, he entered a competition organised by Twentieth Century Fox to find an Italian who could step into his shoes.  He was rejected on the grounds that he was too tall and too thin and that he had a gloomy expression.  There was no putting him off, however, and he continued to pursue his dream.

His first big break came in 1936, when the emerging actress Anna Magnani saw him on stage in the theatre and, impressed with his energy, recommended him to her husband, the director Goffredo Alessandrini for a lead role in his next film, Cavalry.  The film debuted at the Venice Film Festival and subsequently played to full houses all over Italy.

A man of strong principals, he turned down Benito Mussolini's invitation to join the Fascist party after the success of Luciano Serra, Pilot.  Nazzari had become a matinee idol and Mussolini wanted to promote him as a symbol of Italian masculinity but Nazzari allegedly told him: 'Thank you, Duce, but I would prefer not to concern myself with politics, occupied as I am with more pressing artistic commitments.'

Given that Mussolini, the driving force behind the Cinecittà complex in Rome that was in time to be known as 'Hollywood on the Tiber', was keen to ally himself with the stars of the movie industry, Nazzari risked his stand being interpreted as a snub but in the event it had no detrimental effect on his career, perhaps because he willingly participated in some wartime productions that were blatantly propagandist, in particular the 1942 film Bengasi, an anti-British war film set in Libya.

A year earlier, in 1941, the Venice Film Festival had awarded Nazzari the title of Best Actor for the film Caravaggio, il pittore maledetto - Caravaggio, the cursed painter - also directed by Alessandrini. Earlier in 1942, he had starred in La cena delle beffe - the dinner of mockery - a costume drama that takes place in the Florence of the Medici, directed by Alessandro Blasetti.

Later, Nazzari would turn down the chance to play opposite Marilyn Monroe in Let's Make Love, his proposed role going to Yves Montand after Nazzari expressed doubt over his ability to play convincingly in an English-speaking part and confessed that he feared his attempts to sing and dance would attract ridicule.

Amedeo Nazzari in the 1950 film Il brigante Musolino

In fact, he rejected most approaches to play comedy roles in Italy, preferring meatier parts such as that of the brave Neapolitan magistrate who stands up to the Camorra in Luigi Zampa's Processo alla città - A city on trial.

Married in 1957 to Irene Genna, an Italian-Greek actress, he had a daughter, Maria Evelina, who followed him into acting and established a successful career in theatre and television.

In his later years he developed kidney problem and died in Rome in November 1979, aged 71, a few months before his daughter gave birth to his first grandchild, Leonardo.

He is buried at the monumental cemetery of Verano in Rome under the name of Amedeo Nazzari Buffa.

Cagliari as seen by travellers arriving by sea

Travel tip:

Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, is an industrial centre and one of the largest ports in the Mediterranean but is also a city of considerable beauty and history.  When D.H. Lawrence arrived in the 1920s, witnessing the confusion of domes, palaces and ornamental facades that seemed to be piled on top of one another as he approached from the sea, he likened the city to Jerusalem, describing it as 'strange and rather wonderful, not a bit like Italy.’

Travel tip:

Rome's Cinecittà studios were founded in 1937 by Mussolini, his son Vittorio and the Fascist government's head of cinema, Luigi Freddi, under the slogan 'Cinema is the Most Powerful Weapon'. The Fascist leader had propaganda in mind but he was also keen to revive the Italian film industry, which was in crisis at the time.  Later, Cinecittà would become closely associated with the director Federico Fellini, who filmed La Dolce Vita, Satirycon and Casanova there, among other productions.  It is also used for shooting television shows and houses the set for Grande Fratello, the Italian version of Big Brother.

More reading:

Anna Magnani - Oscar-winning actress famous for Rossellini's Rome, Open City

Four-times Oscar winner Federico Fellini left huge legacy of influence

Rudolph Valentino - heartthrob actor who died tragically young

Also on this day:

1936: Death of the brilliant writer Luigi Pirandello

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