obituary
Status: 01/16/2023 3:58 p.m
She turned the heads of film partners and viewers and became a sex symbol. Gina Lollobrigida, affectionately known as “Lollo” in her native Italy, has died at the age of 95.
Artfully coiffed hair, extended eyelashes, sparkling teeth, an elegant black and gold suit with glamorous gold jewelry around the neck. Also in her last big interview on the Italian state television RAI a year ago, Gina Lollobrigida’s big appearance as a diva was important.
My name is Gina Lollobrigida. A woman who has represented Italy in the world. Today, well over 90 years old, I am full of energy and still full of energy.
“Most beautiful toddler in Italy”
Glamour, charisma and above all beauty – that’s what Lollobrigida stood for at the peak of her success when she was Italy’s film icon in the 1950s and 1960s. As a three-year-old, Luigina Lollobrigida, as her real name is, won the “Italy’s most beautiful toddler” competition.
During the years of the economic boom, “La Lollo” was not only celebrated as a sex symbol in her home country. In 1955, she naturally got the leading role in the film “The most beautiful woman in the world”, which she proudly told decades later that it “broke all revenue records and her mother saw it ten times”.
Lollobrigida played alongside many of the greats of her time: from Marcello Mastroianni to Rock Hudson, Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quinn, Frank Sinatra to Sean Connery.
Stormy private life
Privately, “Gina Nazionale”, as she is also called in Italy, was less fortunate. She was said to have had many affairs, which she self-confidently commented on: It is easier to find men than to get rid of them.
She was married to the Serbian doctor Milko Skofic for more than 20 years, and their son Milko Junior assigned a financial guardian to the former film diva a few years ago. Disenfranchised, that’s what people call it. In the RAI interview in November before last, she spoke of “great bitterness”. Italy watched painfully as “Gina Nazionale” suffered from the public family dispute.
Six Bambis and political ambitions
In her career, Lollobrigida has received the prestigious Italian film awards David di Donatello and Nastro d’Argento several times and has been nominated twice for the Golden Globe.
In Germany she received the Bambi for best actress six times, including for her most famous films, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “Trapez”. Never wanting to play more mature women, Lollobrigida largely retired from the film business in the 1970s. After that she worked – also quite successfully – as a photographer and also as a sculptor.
In 1999 she stood in the European elections for the centre-left alliance of Romano Prodi. In the parliamentary elections last September, she made herself available to a small left-wing list as a candidate. During this time, she suffered a broken femur in a fall at her home and had to be hospitalized for a long time.
Lollobrigida once characterized himself as “stubborn and stubborn, enthusiastic and impulsive”. She died in Rome at the age of 95.
Obituary Gina Lollobrigida – “Gina nazionale” died at the age of 95
Jörg Seisselberg, ARD Rome, 16.1.2023 1:49 p.m