"I was walking down the street minding my own business when this man came up to me and said he wanted to put me in the movies. I got very angry and told him that line stopped working yeras ago."
The man in this case was Mario Costa, a top Italian film director, and the girl who tells the story is an appetizing morsel with a name even Italians have trouble pronouncing: Gina Lollobrigida.
Costa gave her a feature role in a film version of Pagliacci. At once, lollo and brigida became Italian synonyms for the left and right female mammae, respectively.
Since then, she has made over twenty-five pictures, but only a fraction of them have penetrated the Cellophane Curtain of purity surrounding the U. S. In the few films Americans have been lucky enough to see, she has proved to be a girl of real beauty, with a warm personality, plenty of charm, and a small but adequate amount of acting talent.
Gina shared her generous bosom with the world in such films as Fan-Fan The Tulip and Times Gone By, but it was not until she appeared in the recent Beauties of the Night for famed French director Rene Clair that she also made public her matchless abdomen and derriere. Gina's charming posterior upset both the Venice Film Festival authorities and the U. S. Customs Office. They wanted it deleted from the film. Rene Clair insisted that it stay in. Clair won out over the Festival authorities and the film copped a prize, but U. S. Customs succeeded in keeping most of Gina's bottom to itself, leaving only one split-second wiggle for American movie-goers.
Yet to be released in this country are Gina's latest pictures, A Woman of Rome and Bread, Love and Dreams. Tantalized by the glimpses of breasts, belly and buttocks in her past films, American men are waiting expectantly to learn what's next on the agenda for unveiling.
Gina rotates a handsome hip for the publicity cameraman.
Above: a ragged Gina in "Bread, Love and Dreams."
Below: in "Times Gone By," as a voluptuous country girl who never learned to say "no."
Gina's revealing harem costume and the nude bathing scene in "Beauties of the Night" made even European eyes pop.
Gina's revealing harem costume and the nude bathing scene in "Beauties of the Night" made even European eyes pop.
