Virna Lisi, a multifaceted Italian actress who found herself hostage to the sultry looks that sparked her career, quitting Hollywood in the 1960s after being typecast in bombshell roles, died Dec. 18 in Rome. She was 78.
The cause was cancer, according to Italian media reports.
A star of Italian cinema by age 20, Lisi drew international attention for her lissome appeal in a range of dramas and farces. She dyed her naturally brunette hair blond, and the presence of a mole near her lips made her resemble a more exotic Marilyn Monroe.
On the Italian screen, Lisi had been presented as chic and elegantly sensual, but she was rebranded for American audiences as a skin-baring temptress. Producer Gordon Carroll described her as having “the high-fashion look of a model in Vogue” yet, on camera, “this animal, this sexual, quality.”
That quality was put to immediate use in her Hollywood debut, the 1965 comedy “How to Murder Your Wife.” The film starred Jack Lemmon as a cartoonist who impulsively weds Lisi after she emerges from a birthday cake in a bikini. His initial lust gives way to regret the morning after.
The role, like her subsequent Hollywood films, played up her physical charms and minimized dialogue because of her limited command of English.
In 1966, she supported Frank Sinatra in the action film “Assault on a Queen” and then played an Italian nurse — again in a bikini — in the tepid comedy “Not With My Wife, You Don’t!” opposite Tony Curtis and George Scott.
“With Jack Lemmon I was a great success,” Lisi told the New York Times decades later. “But you know, they would say, ‘Lisi’s beautiful.’ And I would add, ‘Yes, but she’s also an actress.’”
Her ambitions toward more dramatic work went unfulfilled, at least in Hollywood. She turned down roles that emphasized her sexpot allure, including the lead in director Roger Vadim’s randy sci-fi adventure “Barbarella” (1968). Jane Fonda got the part.
Back in Italy, Lisi won a starring role in the well-received Italian comedy “The Birds, the Bees and the Italians” (1966) and gradually found meatier parts in a career that spanned more than 100 films and TV shows.
Her most acclaimed performance was in “Queen Margot” (1994) as the politically scheming Catherine de’ Medici, the Italian noblewoman who became queen of France in the mid-16th century.
The historical spectacle, which co-starred Isabelle Adjani as Catherine’s daughter, was generally regarded by critics as excessively violent and dramatically overripe. But Lisi, who was rendered almost unrecognizable by unflattering makeup and fat padding, was lauded for her riveting portrayal of evil.
In the Los Angeles Times, critic Peter Rainer wrote that Lisi “gives a terrific dragon-lady performance. … Lisi has a harsh raspy voice without a shade of lilt or sensuality. Her dark rage is almost comic in its magisterial meanness but Lisi doesn’t camp it up.”
She won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival and earned the Cesar — the French equivalent of the Oscar — for best supporting actress.
Lisi credited director Patrice Chéreau with offering her the role, despite his initial hesitation. “He look for an Italian actress because Catherine is Italian,” she told the Boston Herald in broken English. “He told my agent, ‘Virna is too beautiful for this — she must be horrible.’ “
Lisi said she responded, “I love so much that role I don’t care if I look horrible!”
Virna Pieralisi was born Nov. 8, 1936, in Ancona, where her father was a marble exporter.
By 17, she was appearing regularly onscreen, initially in decorative parts in crime capers and musicals. She held her own in dramatic fare such as “The Doll That Took the Town” (1957), playing a model whose false claim of being assaulted ensnares three innocent men in the legal system.
Lisi played the good girl who loses Stanley Baker to femme fatale Jeanne Moreau in the Italian-French drama “Eva” (1962) and portrayed a mistress falsely accused of killing her married lover in the French production “Don’t Tempt the Devil” (1963). She proved a deft comedienne in “Casanova 70″ (1965) as the true-blue sweetheart of Marcello Mastroianni’s epically philandering NATO official.
Writer and producer George Axelrod said he spotted Lisi at the Hotel George V in Paris and was so astonished by her beauty that he dismissed her limited English and got her a Hollywood screen test. Axelrod immediate cast her in “How to Murder Your Wife.”
“In that way, she’d symbolize the lack of communication between husband and wife,” he told the New York Times. “She’d demonstrate that they do not even speak the same language.”
Lisi was married to an Italian construction magnate, Franco Pesci, from 1960 until his death in 2013. Survivors include a son, Corrado, and three grandchildren.
During her promotion in America as a sex symbol, Lisi was sometimes flummoxed by the lecherous questions of the entertainment reporters. Asked what she wore to bed, she replied, “It depends on who I’m sleeping with.”
Her husband was not amused.
When the query was fully explained to her by a translator, she elaborated that when traveling with her secretary, she donned a nightgown. If her son was around, they cuddled in pajamas. With her husband, however, indeed the answer was: “Nothing.”