The Best Ambassadress of Italy

Born in Subiaco, the second of four daughters, Gina has memories of a very difficult childhood during World War II. Her film career began by chance when talent scouts were looking for potential actors among people out on the streets. Gina was discovered one day in front of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where she had won a scholarship and was studying sculpture and painting. It was Vittorio De Sica, firmly convinced of Gina’s artistic potential, who persuaded her to take up a career in cinema.

She was featured on the cover of Time in 1955, when Mediterranean sex appeal was all the rage in American showbiz. The magazine quoted Humphrey Bogart as saying that Gina made Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple.

She was directed by such greats as John Huston, Renato Castellani, Mario Monicelli, Luigi Comencini, Carol Reed, René Clair, Christian Jaque and Vittorio De Sica in over sixty films, sometimes acting in three different languages dongstile stars like Humphrey Bogart, Alec Guinness, Gérard Philipe, Eduardo De Filippo, Vittorio Gassman, Yul Brynner, Sean Connery, Marcello Mastroianni, Frank Sinatra, Rock Hudson and Anthony Quinn. There are so many unforgettable performances that she has become one of the world’s best loved and most popular actresses. Gina Lollobrigida made a significant contribution to the art of moviemaking throughout her long career, devoting her life and talent to upholding the prestige of Italian cinema, representing Italy with distinction in the rest of the world, and receiving countless international awards for her performances.

All through her career, however, Gina never abandoned her first loves: namely painting and sculpture. Her talent as a photographer has won her many prizes and a great deal of praise, and her works have been exhibited in many international museums. She has published six books of photographs and directed two documentaries, one on Indira Gandhi and the other on Fidel Castro.

She knew such contemporary artists as Francesco Messina, Giacomo Manzù, Ilya Glazunov, Giorgio De Chirico, Salvador Dalí and Jacob Epstein. When they asked her to pose, she was highly flattered and agreed, but always watched the way they worked with great attention, seeking to grasp the secrets of their art and talent. She continued to produce pieces of sculpture every so often, and it was while observing Giacomo Manzù fashion her sculptural portrait that she decided to return definitively to this art: “It was from him that I learned the humility and passion indispensable in sculpture.”

She represented Italy at the 1992 Expo in Seville with a sculpture entitled Living Together, a child riding on a great eagle: a surreal image of harmony between nature and mankind. The French president François Mitterrand complimented her on this work and awarded her the Legion of Honor for artistic merit, describing her as an artiste de valeur. She was also made a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in February 2003 by the French minister of culture Jean-Jacques Aillagon.

A Cavaliere della Repubblica in Italy, she was also made an honorary member of the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, the third woman to receive this honor after the astronomer Margherita Hack and the Nobel laureate Rita Levi Montalcini.

In recognition of her longstanding efforts on behalf of various humanitarian organizations, Gina Lollobrigida was appointed the first ambassadress of the FAO, the United Nations Organization responsible for the problems of hunger in the world. She has also been closely involved with UNICEF, UNESCO, Médecins sans Frontières, Mother Teresa of Calcutta and the children of Romania.

Highly versatile in the figurative arts, Gina Lollobrigida has produced extraordinary photographic documentation on the many aspects of human life while displaying constant concern for children.

Over five hundred thousand (500,000!) people turned out to celebrate and applaud at an important and unusual event held in August 2002 at Iesolo, the beach of Venice, when a two-kilometer stretch of the seafront was named after Gina Lollobrigida, Italian artist. It is very seldom indeed that streets are named after someone still living, but then Gina Lollobrigida is a living legend.

A similar event took place a year later in Subiaco on 22 March 2003, when a marble plaque was placed, amid the enthusiastic acclaim of her fellow citizens, on the house where she was born.

The sculptural work that she neglected while making films has been her full-time activity over the last ten years. She has produced over sixty works, some of which in marble.

Gina was wholly involved in all the phases of work in the studios and foundries of Pietrasanta: from the initial idea to the preparatory work in clay and wax and the casting in bronze. She put the finishing touches to the most delicate parts herself, handling cutters and emery paper like a skilled worker. The gilding in 24-carat gold of many of the statues based on her own film characters is again all her own work. So far she has kept all the works jealously concealed.

The first great exhibition of her work is finally scheduled to open in June 2003 in Moscow’s renowned Pushkin Museum, the most important center of decorative arts in the Russian capital. Gina’s sculptures will then arrive at the Venice Lido in the fall for art and movies exhibition before going on to the Musée de la Monnaie in Paris and other major museums throughout the world. They will be accompanied by this catalogue, which is itself essentially an expression of the dynamic and determined personality of the most extraordinary ambassadresses of Italian art.