Adorable Story #55: Virna Lisi
The Italian actress who left Hollywood for success in Europe
“My husband was not very happy about my career, Franco is a jealous man — thank God! After we married he tried to take me away from all this movie business.”
— Virna Lisi
Early years
Virna Lisa Pieralisi was born on November 8, 1936 in Ancona, on the Italian Adriatic coast, where her father had a marble exporting business.
When the family moved to Rome in the early 1950s, Virna was doing well at school and there were plans for her to go to business college.
However, in 1953, a friend of the family — the singer Giacomo Rondinella — persuaded the producer of a film he was making to give her a test, and she got a small part. The film, E Napoli Canta (And Naples Sings, 1953) began Virna’s career, who appeared (with minor roles) in more than a dozen movies over the next two years.
She then had her first leading role, in a film by one of the emerging generation of Italian directors of the time, Francesco Maselli: La Donna del Giorno (The Doll That Took the Town, 1957).
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While appearing in a Roman theatre production in 1959, Virna was persistently courted by an architect/property developer, Franco Pesci: Virna and Franco married in 1960 and soon had a son, Corrado.
Meanwhile, she appeared in Sergio Corbucci’s Romolo e Remo (Romulus and Remus, 1961) with the two musclemen heroes of the moment, Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott, who played the twins of the early Roman legend.
Even in this historic spectacular movie, she was able to bring depth to a glamorous but spineless heroine invented by six scriptwriters (including legendary director Sergio Leone).
She later commented good-humouredly:
“I weighed less than 50 kilos at the time, but the muscular Steve Reeves dropped me at the first take when he had to carry me into Romulus’s tent to seduce me.”
France
After this first leading role, Virna made several films in France, including Les Bonnes Causes (Don’t Tempt the Devil, 1963), directed by Christian-Jaque, who then cast her in the role that brought her first international attention, in La Tulipe Noire (The Black Tulip, 1964) where she was the leading lady to French star Alain Delon.
After this big splash, she was cast in Mario Monicelli’s raucously funny Casanova 70 (1965) — which received an Oscar nomination for its screenplay — and was another international hit in which her leading man was Marcello Mastroianni.
Hollywood
These roles and her commercial success inevitably brought the offer of a Hollywood contract, and her part in Richard Quine’s How to Murder Your Wife (1965).
Her performance in one her most famous scenes (clip above) — where she emerges from a cake to meet the eyes of Jack Lemmon — became iconic and captured people’s imagination for years to come.
Jack Lemmon later recounted that Virna’s ebullient husband, Franco Pesci, was so jealous that he tried to attack him after visiting the set during a love scene.
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