Valentina Cortese

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Valentina Cortese (2012)

Valentina Cortese (born January 1, 1923 in Milan , Lombardy ; † July 10, 2019 there ) was an Italian actress .

Life

Cortese was enthusiastic about acting from an early age and went to Rome as a teenager , where she attended acting courses at the "Scalera Film". One of the teachers there, Guido Salvini , helped her to get her first small role in L'orizzonte dipinto in 1941. Already in the following cinema work Il bravo di Venezia , which Scalera also produced, she played the leading female role. The blonde, slim, graceful actress became the model fiancé of the fascist film industry in Italy, a well-bred, modest young woman who always suffered from love-making torments. She remained caught in this stereotype until the end of the Second World War. Dissatisfied with this definition, Cortese turned to the theater and played alongside Carlo Tamberlani from October 1944 in Jacques Deval's Mademoiselle and then under Lamberto Picasso's direction in The Women of Clare Boothe Luce at the Teatro Valle in Rome. In 1945/1946 she played at the Teatro Eliseo under Ettore Giannini . Finally, Alessandro Blasetti united a star ensemble with Cortese, Vittorio De Sica , Elisa Cegani , Anna Proclemer , Massimo Girotti , Camillo Pilotto , María Mercader and Annibale Betrone for a Priestley and a Pirandello piece.

The stage experience soon gave Cortese interesting cinema offers. The role of the teacher in Un americano in vacanza (which goes hand in hand with well-deserved visitor success) was still clinging to its war cliché. But her next role (in Roma città libera ) offered her the opportunity to show previously unimagined acting maturity, which soon allowed her to pursue an international career in Great Britain and Hollywood. She married Richard Basehart , the co-star of her American, expressively played House on Telegraph Hill by Robert Wise from 1951, soon after. Unsatisfied with her professional career abroad, however, Cortese (with her husband) returned to Italy, where she also only shot works that were not challenging for her abilities over the next few years. The international co-productions of this time also offered little more than the role of the beautiful. In The Barefoot Countess she was cast as the betrayed wife of the Count behind Humphrey Bogart , Ava Gardner and Rossano Brazzi .

Michelangelo Antonioni enabled her to achieve new acting successes with his film Die Freundinnen . The role of a melancholy, yearning woman was awarded a Nastro d'Argento for the best supporting role. In the following years, however (with the exception of the Spanish Calabuig ), mostly less interesting, streamlined films were found in Cortese's filmography. Towards the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the following decade, the actress was only offered a few cinema roles, including the baroque and grotesquely made-up Valentina in Federico Fellini's Julia and the Ghosts (1965), the elegant and dispassionate Julia in Barabbas (1961), the greedy and authoritarian Mathilde Miller in The Visit (1964).

From 1959 onwards, Cortese turned back to the stage, qualitatively disappointed by the cinema and quantitatively insufficiently challenged. Over the next fifteen years at the “Piccolo Teatro della Città” in Milan under the direction of Giorgio Strehler, acclaimed performances by a. a. Plays by Anton Chekhov , William Shakespeare , Luigi Pirandellos , Bertolt Brecht and Carlo Goldoni . In 1973 she appeared alongside Umberto Orsini and Adriana Asti in Luchino Visconti's last theater work, Harold Pinter's Alte Zeiten . Ten years later she was Maria Stuart in Franco Zeffirelli's production. Being seen less and less in the cinema, Cortese also took advantage of television offers, including works by Dino Partesano and Silverio Blasi . Outstanding works in the early 1970s were two supporting roles. She played alongside Claude Jade , Jean-Pierre Cassel and John McEnery the latter 's mother in Gérard Brach's tragicomic Das Schiff auf der Wiese (1971) and alongside Richard Burton , Alain Delon and Romy Schneider Leon Trotsky's second wife in The Girl and the Murderer . These two films were followed by her most famous role, for which she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress: the aging actress Séverine in François Truffaut's The American Night .

In the 1980s she succeeded in establishing herself alongside Alida Valli and Sophia Loren as one of the “great old women” among Italy's actresses; however, it was no longer active from 1994.

Cortese's other well-known film and television roles include Herodias in Franco Zeffirelli's bible adaptation Jesus of Nazareth from 1977 and the mother of Francis of Assisi in Zeffirelli's drama Brother Sun, Sister Moon from 1972. She also had well-known appearances in the cinema as a diva in Die American Night (1973) and as the exalted mother of John McEnerys in Le bateau sur l'herbe . For the former, she not only won the British Film Awards , but was also nominated for the Golden Globe Award . At the 1975 Academy Awards she was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Supporting Actress category.

Cortese was married to the American actor Richard Basehart between 1951 and 1960 . The marriage resulted in a son, Jackie Basehart . Valentina Cortese died in Milan in July 2019 at the age of 96.

Filmography (selection)

Web links

Commons : Valentina Cortese  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Enrico Lancia, article Valentina Cortese , in: Enrico Lancia, Roberto Poppi: Dizionario des Cinema Italiano. Le Attrici. Gremese Editore, Rome 1999. pp. 86/87
personal data
SURNAME Cortese, Valentina
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian actress
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Milan , Lombardy , Italy
DATE OF DEATH July 10, 2019
Place of death Milan , Lombardy