Foreign Sex Stars

In his versified Tribute to Marlene Dietrich, the late Noel Coward wrote:

We know God made trees, And the birds and the bees,

And the seas for the fishes to swim in.

We are also aware

That He has quite a flair

For creating exceptional women.

The same impish lyric-- strewn with the names of historic love goddesses, from Eve to Helen of Troy--contains Coward's wry observation "that sex is a question of lighting." Noel didn't really believe it. He knew, as we all know, that a lady needs more than wattage to turn a man on, and vice versa. The fabled Marlene was merely a pioneer, synthesizing the elusive appeal of those foreign femmes fatales who have reached across oceans, continents and language barriers to enliven our fantasies, mostly in the movies.

While we may ogle our home-grown American beauties ad infinitum, eying the girl next door need not curb appreciation of exotic blooms bred in such faraway places as Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Finland, France and Brazil. Some are creatures so rare that we seldom catch a glimpse of them Stateside, yet they are famous faces--and becoming more so--on the international film scene, which means we're likely to be seeing more of them as time goes by. Most hope to make movies in America, or with Americans, which means they dream of Hollywood as a new land to conquer, though they don't necessarily want to live there. Some of the foreign belles photographed for Playboy are serious actresses, some are flaming sexpots. Generally, they're a lucky combination of both. They have to be. Whether female or male or of indeterminate gender, a star without sex appeal is like a summer without sun. There's no such thing, by definition. All present are quite obviously exceptional women.

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Eleonora Vallone, whose movie career is just beginning, represents a new, hopeful, exceptionally well-endowed generation of Italian super-women. It all comes naturally to Eleonora. The 24-year-old daughter of actor Raf Vallone, a veteran Latin lover (last seen as The Greek Tycoon's lusty brother), and memorable screen beauty Elena Varzi, now retired, Eleonora was married young, which often inhibits a girl's career plans. Separated from her doctor husband since last year, she has a four-year-old son and divides her time between her bambino and classes in painting, acting, voice and guitar. Already to her credit are a minor-league Mexican film and a more promising adventure epic, L'Aquila Bifronte (that's The Eagle with Two Faces, if you're wondering), co-starring Franco Nero and Helmut Berger. It's a story of early Nazism in Germany, and Eleonora hopes The Eagle will get her off and winging.

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Sonia Braga,whose Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands broke all records last year as the most successful Brazilian film ever made, was largely responsible for putting Brazilian movies on the map, even in Brazil. Prior to Sonia's triumph in Dona Flor, which outgrossed Star Wars, Jaws and The Exorcist down there, her rambunctious country-men generally preferred flashy American imports to flicks filled with local color. They now view La Braga as a national institution second only to Carnival in Rio. After she appeared onstage in Hair, Sonia starred in a prestigious TV soap opera that made her name a household word to 60,000,000 viewers. Since then, she has done seven feature films. Her most recent, Lady in the Bus (also directed by boyish Bruno Barreto, of Dona Flor), is another steamer, certain to firm up sultry Sonia's reputation as the number-one sex symbol in South America. She doesn't mind a bit. "Lady in the Bus is very sexy," says Sonia, "about a virgin who marries a very rich macho Brazilian man. She's violently deflowered and hates her husband. So she begins to ride the bus every afternoon, to find strange men and have a good time. She feels no guilt."

Sonia herself was the companion for a time to the photographer Antonio Guerreiro, whose exclusive pictures for Playboy show considerably more of her than Brazilian audiences were allowed to see a year or so ago. Dona Flor's nudest love scenes were trimmed in Rio, where rigid censorship prohibited showing pubic hair, for example, though the rules have been loosening up since Braga took over. "I loved Marilyn Monroe and had great admiration for her ... the first sex symbol to be a little detached," says Sonia, adding with emphasis, "In my country, the best way of being a feminist nowadays is to assert yourself in terms of your own work. To be a sex symbol, for a woman, is a political position. Every actress should get into magazines, so that the censors in Brazil will become used to the idea of nudity. It's important to undress at this moment in history." Amen.

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Born in Java of Dutch Indonesian parents who emigrated to Holland when she was a child, exotic Laura Gemser is a dark, graceful Eurasian beauty, fluent in six languages and eminent--since 1975--in at least seven films of the Black Emanuelle series. The first, made in Italy, earned so much money in Europe that it begot spin-offs bearing such exploitable titles as Emanuelle Goes East, Sister Emanuelle (she takes the veil but quickly sheds it) and Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. Although the movies were not much aesthetically, they enabled Laura to ask for percentage deals and edge her way up to small roles in big films (as Orson Welles's mistress in Voyage of the Damned) or major roles in minor European films opposite, for instance, Jack Palance and Stuart Whitman. More recently, she went to Japan to do The Bushido Blade, a historical adventure drama costarring Richard Boone, Sony Chiba and Toshiro Mifune. No fewer than 15 movies in six years. Plus globe-trotting on a scale to equal Henry Kissinger in his peak seasons. "I love to travel, and films take you everywhere. We have been to China, Australia, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Egypt, South and Central America, the Middle East. Everywhere...."

The "we" is characteristic, Laura's acknowledgment of a particularly close relationship with her husband, Gabriele Tinti, a handsome, 40ish Italian actor whom she met on location in Kenya. Tinti had a promising fling in Hollywood back in the Sixties, when director Robert Aldrich hired him for The Flight of the Phoenix and The Legend of Lylah Clare (as gardener-lover to Kim Novak). But he gave up a five-year TV contract because he was homesick for Rome.

"When I met Laura, I thought: What is this skinny little girl? Then she put on a bikini at the beach and I see she has everything in the right place. So we started to stay together, to make love. It wasn't until we were flying back over Idi Amin's Uganda that we realized we'd have to say goodbye, and we didn't want to---"

Laura smiles. "I went back to my boyfriend I'd been living with for five years in Belgium. But it was over, anyway, (continued on page 242)Foreign Sex Stars(continued from page 170) after I met Gabriele. He's very affectionate always."

At home in Rome, Laura and Gabriele make togetherness look easy. "Her time is now," he says. "She should be the star. But we like to stay together. If she's offered one movie and I'm offered a different movie, and we're offered a third movie together---"

"Then we do the one we can do together," nods Laura. "I don't have to be a star. I just want to do good work."

If Laura appears in a film that doesn't have a satisfactory role for him, Gabriele may sign on as a production photographer. "When she has a nude scene with someone else, I take a walk. Not jealous, but I'm still Italian, you know?" He will also testify that Laura, despite her provocative public image, is skittish as a gazelle offscreen. "She's very shy around the house, always wearing a kimono, grabbing something to cover herself. I never see her nude at home ... oh, maybe three times. To see her naked, I have to pay in the theater like everyone else."

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Israel's Nitza Shaul was discovered in the army while serving with an entertainment unit. This comely former soldier no longer does song-and-dance revues at the front--performing As You Like It in Hebrew is more her style--and cannot think of herself as a sex symbol, though by any standard, she's the most popular young actress in the country. "It's true I'm doing quite well," Nitza allows. "I can't walk in the street in Tel Aviv, because people recognize me. They are ... well, not aggressive but quite determined and attentive."

They are also lining up these days to see Nitza's highly praised performance in Little Man (for further praise, see our review in this issue), a romantic comedy hit in which she goes back to her roots as a girl entertaining the troops. On this occasion, five of them simultaneously. In an armored tank. During a rainstorm.

When Nitza's first film, The Policeman, opened in London in 1974, critics found her "bewitching" (The Daily Mail) and "the prettiest girl seen on the screen for many a month" (Daily Telegraph). It's been all upward mobility from that point on. She was named Most Promising Actress by the Israeli branch of the America Israel Cultural Foundation and accepted a grant to study drama, dance and pantomime in London, though she was already an established professional with Tel Aviv's prestigious Cameri Theater company. She wound up on BBC Television and onstage in the West End, scoring another personal triumph in the first British production of Tennessee Williams' The Red Devil Battery Sign. "I was La Niña, one of those terrible Williams characters, a really dramatic role in a difficult, heavy play. But Tennessee worked with us on it for a month, and it was a wonderful experience."

Nitza currently commutes between Tel Aviv and London with her husband, Boron Salomon, a conductor and classical guitarist who was also an old army buddy. They keep flats in both cities, ready to move wherever opportunity knocks. While she waits to see where Little Man leads, Nitza has collaborated in writing a film adaptation of "a very famous novel," but she thinks it's premature to discuss it. "After my next film, I hope to come back to America and stay longer," she said at the end of a recent visit to L.A. "The advantage of becoming known internationally is that you can reach more people. I like Jane Fonda very much, Shirley MacLaine, Liv Ullmann. And I love Jeanne Moreau. All those women who have some aim in life apart from being on the screen."

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Sirpa Lane slid onto a tiny chair in a hole-in-the-wall Japanese restaurant that she likes in Paris. She was wearing tight black-leather pants with a pinkish-orange V-neck top and carrying a bikini in her bag, on her way to Au Printemps to exchange it. "Too small," she said. "I'm not the same girl I used to be ... physically, mentally, spiritually or any way." The girl she used to be was a Finnish-born model who made a splash in Paris when she appeared in Walerian Borowczyk's La Bête, doing one of those X-ish, explicit girl-with-gorilla numbers opposite the Beast of the title. True, Borowczyk is a serious director whom no French-film buff would dismiss as a mere pornographer for depicting a bit of bestiality. Sirpa's next gig was the leading role in Roger Vadim's La Jeune Fille Assassinée (The Murdered Girl was called Charlotte over here) as a morbid social butterfly with a death wish that brings her to a grisly finish. "People say Vadim discovered me, but actually I made La Bête before Vadim ... Vadim's movie came out first. Everyone wrote so much bullshit about sex films, erotica. But I loved it.... Borowczyk was amazed that I had no fear of the camera. I never even knew the camera was there.

"After Vadim, I stopped working for a while. I was in love with a man. I always need to be in love. Also, I was being offered silly semiporno films which did not interest me." Free-spirited Sirpa, as soon as she could find the right bikini, was taking off for Santo Domingo to begin a movie called Papaya. "I'm a journalist who goes there and finds a dead body, you know? Then the police come---" She writes fini to the synopsis with an eloquent Gallic shrug, acquired since she ran away from her home in Finland at the age of 15 and found the high road to Paris.

Nowadays, she finds that the haut monde bores her after a while. "That fashionable world is OK, once every six weeks. But those people don't know who I really am. I'm an ordinary girl of the street. I lived in the street, I was born there, you know? I like to go out alone, with little money, no jewelry. I get drunk in a disco and dance all night with whomever I please and come home at six in the morning."

A big-budget spaghetti Western looms in Sirpa's plans for the near future. Meanwhile, she has had an off-again, on-again romance with a top American macho star whose indiscretions abroad sound so newsworthy that she claps her hands over my ears while whispering his name. She has also conceived a passion for Richard Gere, whom she has never met, after seeing him in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. "Do you know him, this Gere? Yes? Well, tell him Sirpa wants to make a movie with him, don't say I want to marry him. Maybe we could pretend to interview Gere. You'll say I'm a Finnish journalist...." No, I'll say she's a Finn with a lot of flair.

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Another girl about Paris is sporty, French, sensuous Catherine Serre. When she's not hobnobbing with Jean-Paul Belmondo or other "in" people at Cas-tel's, she's a pacesetter in the social swim at St.-Tropez. Catherine is also an accomplished skier and sailing enthusiast. You'll find very few jet-set jocks in better shape, which does not imply that the girl's not serious. "Everything I do I take seriously," she says, "and I have an absolute passion for cinema." TV, theater and modeling were her mainstays until last year, when she played one of the more enticing prostitutes in One Two Two, a French film about a celebrated World War Two bordello. This year she'll be getting far greater exposure amid the gadgetry of the new James Bond Moonraker, with Roger Moore.

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Two more Italian beauties should be in order, since Italy has been exporting bellezza for centuries, from before Botticelli until long after Loren and Cardinale. Both Leonora Fani and Dalila Di Lazzaro are products of northern Italy, both in their mid-20s, both runaways who left home at an early age to find themselves in Cinecittà and points south. Both list Gone with the Wind and Dr. Zhivago as their all-time favorite movies. Nothing else about them is the same.

Leonora Fani's career began when she posed nude for an Italian magazine (Playmen), her compensation for not winning a Miss Teenager contest. Her nymphet image has subsequently brightened up at least 20 movies, in one of which (Bestialità) she was cast as a depraved young girl who made love to a dog. That was not the high point of her professional achievements. A high point, in Leonora's opinion, would be to appear in an Ingmar Bergman film. "I'd be a militant feminist," says she, "if it were not for the desire to keep peace with my boyfriend, who is against it." Ten years from now, she would like to be behind the camera directing a movie of her own. She'd like to live in Venice and likes riding her motorcycle at top speed (presumably not in Venice). Pressed to explore her fantasies about what she'd like to do on a perfect day, volatile Leonora becomes a bit evasive: "My ideal would be to fly a small airplane all day, with the possibility of landing whenever and wherever it pleases me. Though if I were sure my boyfriend wasn't going to read this, my answer might be very different."

The blonde, incomparable Dalila Di Lazzaro was discovered by Andy Warhol through a photo advertising eye drops. Dahlia's eyes have it, and she wound up with a featured role in Warhol's Frankenstein. That led to a contract with superproducer Carlo Ponti and several other films, followed by endless speculation in the gossip-hungry Italian press that she and Signor Ponti (Sophia Loren's husband, of course) were more than business acquaintances. "Ponti is a very nice man, like a father to me," says Dalila, who pooh-poohs such rumormongering and wonders at times whether the movie world is not too cruel and cynical for her taste. She's still with it, though, thinking she'd like to be in movies by Robert Altman or Bernardo Bertolucci or Federico Fellini, which is not unlikely. Her most recent appearances were in The Girl in the Yellow Pajamas, with Ray Milland and Mel Ferrer, and The Last Romantic Lover, directed by France's Just Jaeckin of Emmanuelle fame. In her daydreams, dreamy Dalila knows exactly what she'd require for a perfect day: "I would love to spend a day in a recording studio making a record with Frank Sinatra and Mick Jagger; on one side of the record, I'd be singing with Sinatra; on the other side, singing with Jagger." Now, that's top-of-the-line daydreaming.

"Laura, despite her provocative public image, is skittish offscreen."