Screen legend Gina Lollobrigida to be honored at the 2008 Rome Film Festival
Throughout her five-decade+ career, Gina Lollobrigida has appeared in nearly 70 film and television productions, including many of the best-known European movies of the 1950s.
Among those are René Clair’s Beauties of the Night (1952), Christian-Jaque’s Fanfan la Tulipe (1952), both starring Gerard Philipe; in addition to Robert Sidomak’s Le Grand jeu / Flesh and the Woman (1954), Luigi Zampa’s La Romana / Woman of Rome (1954), and, as Esmeralda, Jean Delannoy’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1958), opposite Anthony Quinn.
‘Full of fire’
Below are a few snippets from Rachel Donadio’s interview with Gina Lollobrigida for the New York Times.
“She’s pleased, she said, but still surprised by her success. ‘In my career I did nothing to become what I am,’ she said. ‘It was the public made me an actress.'”
…
“I create La Bersagliera, oh, Dio. It fits me like a glove, the character,’ she added. ‘It’s very full of fire. Was like me.’
“Ms. Lollobrigida still appears to be full of fire. Last year she almost married a Spaniard 34 years her junior. The decision to call it off was hers, she said. ‘Obviously.’
“‘I like younger men because they are generous,’ she said. ‘They don’t have complex. Especially with me, my God.'”
Rouben Mamoulian interview
Author Allan Ellenberger has posted on his blog parts of a 1983 interview writer David Del Valle conducted with director Rouben Mamoulian.
In the interview, Mamoulian discusses working with Miriam Hopkins, infamous for her alleged scene-stealing obsession, in the classic 1931 horror drama Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which Hopkins plays the prostitute who meets a gruesome end at the hands of Fredric March’s bipolar doctor. Miriam Hopkins, one of the brightest Hollywood stars of the 1930s, is the subject of Allan’s current biographical project.
By the way, Mamoulian and Hopkins would work together again four years later on Becky Sharp, the first three-strip Technicolor motion picture ever made. Hopkins received her one and only Academy Award nomination for her performance in the title role.
Trivia bit: the two leading women of the 1941 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Lana Turner and Ingrid Bergman, also ended up exchanging roles. MGM wanted Bergman, all sweetness and light, to play the nice fiancee, while the sultry Turner was to play the prostitute. Bergman, however, insisted that that should be cast as the unfortunate sex worker. And that’s what eventually happened. That inferior filmization of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel was directed by Victor Fleming and starred Spencer Tracy.
Below is a snippet from the Del Valle/Mamoulian interview:
DDV: Fredric March notwithstanding, Miriam Hopkins is the scene-stealer of the film. Was there any truth to her notoriety?
RM: All of the stories I hear about Miriam Hopkins, her temper tantrums, and her demonic ego were not in play at the time we were filming Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For me, as a director, Miriam was a very gifted and talented actress who could play comedy (as she did for [Ernst] Lubitsch) or a tragic figure such as Ivy. Originally, Miriam wanted to play Muriel, the Rose Hobart role, and I told her that it would be very dull for her, and that I knew she could play this Ivy character like no one else. Her scenes were considered very erotic for 1931. In fact, we filmed her bed sequence when she first encounters Dr. Jekyll with her removing her clothes under the sheets. Not much of this remained, I am told. Miriam wanted to work with me and I think she sensed how disappointed I would have been, had she played the other role. Directing her performance is one of my fondest memories of the picture. And if anything, she was Bette Davis’ equal!
Miriam Hopkins image: Allan R. Ellenberger Collection
The Broadway Melody was the Academy Awards’ first Best Picture talkie
The Broadway Melody was one of the biggest box office hits of the 1920s. Released by MGM in early 1929, the musical melodrama about two show-biz sisters in love with the same man, rode the wave of the all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing craze of the period. However pedestrian its storyline, The Broadway Melody even went on to win the first best picture Academy Award given to a talking film. (The awards were only two years old. The previous winner was the silent war drama Wings.)
Directed by Harry Beaumont, and written by Norman Houston, James Gleason (best known for his fast-talking, grouchy characters in films of the 1930s and 1940s), and Sarah Y. Mason, from a story by Edmund Goulding (who directed Grand Hotel, Dark Victory, and The Razor’s Edge, among others), The Broadway Melody starred vaudeville performer Charles King, one of the many stage personalities who went West at the dawn of the talking era (and one of the many who failed to make it in the movies), the lively silent-screen veteran Bessie Love, and relative newcomer Anita Page, who’d been in Hollywood for only a couple of years and who’d just found fame after playing opposite Joan Crawford in two Girls Gone Wild flicks, Our Dancing Daughters and Our Modern Maidens.
That said, even though Page was younger, prettier, and the inspiration for composer Nacio Herb Brown, Page’s husband for about a year in the mid-1930s, who wrote the song “You Were Meant for Me” expressly for her, Bessie Love stole the notices for The Broadway Melody. Love’s performance as the older sister was widely praised, and she was even “considered” for a best actress Academy Award. (There were no official nominations for the period 1928–1929, but several performers made it to the Academy’s voting board’s shortlist.)
Alas, Love’s comeback – her career had gone downhill in the late 1920s – lasted just as long as the musical craze. In other words, about one year. Anita Page didn’t fare much better, staying at MGM a couple more years before ending her acting career in programmers at Poverty Row studios in the mid-1930s. She married a naval officer at about that time, and retired from show business, though in recent years she appeared in supporting roles in several minor productions, including Sunset After Dark and Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood.
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