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- Vincent Schiavelli, selected in 1997 by Vanity Fair as one of the best character actors in America, had made over 120 film and television appearances. He studied acting at NYU's Theatre Program. Aside from his acting career, Vincent was the author of three cookbooks, and has written numerous articles on food for magazines and newspapers. In 2001, he received the James Beard Journalism Award.
- Actress
- Additional Crew
Daniela Giordano was born on November 7, 1946 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy. Giordano attended school in Milan, Italy, where she lived with her family for ten years before returning to Palermo at age fourteen. Daniela was the winner of several local beauty pageants in her home town of Palermo and, in the wake of winning the 1966 Miss Italia contest at age nineteen, finished in second place in the 1967 Miss Europe contest. Giordano went on to work as a model prior to acting in her first movie in 1967. Among the notable directors that Daniela acted in films for are Mario Bava, León Klimovsky, Alfonso Brescia, Luigi Cozzi, Sergio Martino, and Paul Naschy.- She never found the international cross-over fame destined for Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, and most American audiences would not recognize her name, but voluptuous, visually stunning Eleonora Rossi Drago certainly made male hearts pulsate in Europe with her scores of princesses and temptresses throughout Italian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. She eventually earned respect as a fine actress and elevated her status in the films of Luigi Comencini and Michelangelo Antonioni, among others. But for the most part, she gamely played the sex card in a career that stretched a bit past two decades.
She was born Palmira Omiccioli (some sources also list Palmina as her first name, near Genoa, Italy (Columbus' birthplace) on September 23, 1925, the daughter of a sea captain. She married at the age of 17 and bore a daughter Fiorella but the marriage (to a gentleman named Rossi) did not last. She then found work as a department store mannequin and began actually designing couture clothing herself. An arresting beauty, she started competing in beauty contests and wound up in fourth place in the "Miss Italy" pageant. Gina Lollobrigida came in third. The attention lured her to films.
She moved to Rome and in 1949 began receiving small movie roles while using her married name of Rossi. Her first two big breaks came with Behind Closed Shutters (1951) [Behind Closed Shutters] with Massimo Girotti, a melodrama about prostitution, and the highly controversial Sensualita (1952) [Sensuality] in which Marcello Mastroianni and Amedeo Nazzari violently quarrel over her affections. The earlier picture was directed by Luigi Comencini and considered a strong success. The highly impressed Comencini went on to cast Eleonora as a female lead in his next film La tratta delle bianche (1952) [The White Slave Trade or Girls Marked for Danger], another tawdry melodrama about prostitution that co-starred Vittorio Gassman and also showcased the up-and-coming Sophia Loren.
It was obvious that Rossi-Drago had the makings of a bosomy sex goddess but she constantly strove to better her acting reputation in classier material. In 1955 she won critical notice on stage as Helena in Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" opposite Marcello Mastroianni as Astrov. Her finest hour in films came about that same year with the release of Antonnini's The Girlfriends (1955) [The Girlfriends], in which she starred in the rags-to-riches story of a humble girl who becomes a respected owner of a fashion salon and the social class struggle therein. Among her other standout roles in the 1950s were Kean: Genius or Scoundrel (1957), again opposite Vittorio Gassman, who also directed, and the award-winning Italian/French co-production Violent Summer (1959), in which she played a married woman approaching middle age who surrenders herself to a younger man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) during the summer of '43 and height of fascism. The film earned her the "Silver Ribbon" award, voted for by Italian film journalists, and the "best actress" award at the Mar del Plata Film Festival in Argentina.
In order to work continuously, however, she was forced to take on provocative roles of lesser quality -- roles that usually emphasized her physical attributes or enhanced the scenery around her. While Sophia Loren had a Carlo Ponti to promote her internationally, Rossi-Drago was less fortunate. By the 1960s she was relegated to such unmemorable adventures, horrors and sword-and-sand spectacles as David and Goliath (1960) [David and Goliath] with Orson Welles playing King Saul; The Carpet of Horror (1962) [The Carpet of Horror]; and Sword of the Conqueror (1961) [Sword of the Conqueror] opposite a raping and pillaging Jack Palance. Elsewhere, she was pretty much overlooked in the epic ensemble as Lot's wife in John Huston's mammoth failure The Bible in the Beginning... (1966).
Things did not improve into the decade and after appearing with Helmut Berger in the critically-panned retelling of Dorian Gray (1970) and Pier Angeli in the pedestrian Sergio Bergonzelli giallo In the Folds of the Flesh (1970) [In the Folds of the Flesh], she decided to call it quits. Blending back inconspicuously into mainstream society, she married Sicilian businessman Domenico La Cavera in 1973, and eventually retired to Palermo, Italy. She died at age 82 of a brain hemorrhage on December 2, 2007, and was survived by her second husband and daughter. - Daniela Rocca was a beautiful and talented model, actress and writer, born in one of the poorest districts of Sicily, who found fleeting success in Italian cinema. Although she had envisioned herself as a writer, she entered a beauty pageant, was elected Miss Catania in 1953, and after competing for the Miss Italy title, she made her screen debut in 1954 in «La Luciana».
Rocca was cast in horror films as Riccardo Freda's «Caltiki, the Immortal Monster» (co-directed by Mario Bava) and international productions as Abel Gance's «Austerlitz», but her attractive looks made her ideal for the péplum genre, appearing in Fernando Cerchio's «Judith and Holofernes», Vittorio Cottafavi's «The Legions of Cleopatra», Bruno Vailati's «The Giant of Marathon» (also co-directed by Bava), Vittorio Sala's «The Queen of the Amazons» and most notably in the Italian-American co-production co-directed by Raoul Walsh and Bava, «Esther and the King», in which she played adulterous Queen Vashti, who dances to the court and ends her performance baring her breasts as an act of defiance to King Ahasuerus, and to the prudish film industries of those days.
The following year director Pietro Germi decided to make «Divorce Italian Style», a comedy denouncing the prohibition of divorce by Italian society, while being indulgent to crimes of passion. Germi gave Rocca the role of her career at 24. When she accepted to play an unattractive wife with a mustachioed upper lip, it was seen as an act of great courage for a young symbol of Mediterranean beauty. The movie became an international hit, she won the Best Actress award at the Avellino Neorealism Film Festival, and the movie received the Academy Award for Best Screenplay.
But Rocca had fallen hopelessly in love with Germi and when he rejected her, she attempted suicide. Although she continued to appear in films, by 1963 she was considered unreliable and received no film offers. She appeared in Fred Zinnemann's «Behold a Pale Horse» in 1964, but fell into a state of severe depression. She recovered in a mental institution, in Palermo. In 1978 Rocca gave and interview to Marco Bellocchio for the documentary «The Cinema Machine», in which the actress claimed she had been abandoned by her former colleagues. "They said I was crazy, when all I had was a nervous breakdown. They sent me off to the hospital. It took a long time for the doctors to realize that I wasn't mad and let me go."
Daniela Rocca spent the last years of her life near Catania, at a retirement home where she wrote the books «Secret Agent with License to Live», «Lawyer for Rent», «Condemned to Death», «Psychoanalysis, Dreams, and Fantasies Hidden in the Mind», and the poetry collection «Ara».
A tragic symbol of short-lived fame in cinema and of unrequited love, Rocca was the object of two literary homages: the Argentine poet Juan Gelman dedicated a poem to the actress called «Theory About Daniela Rocca», and on April 12, 2016 Domenico Trischitta opened his drama in two acts «Quick Sands» in the Musco theater in Catania, based on her life. - Enzo Andronico was born on 13 May 1924 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy. He was an actor, known for Isabella, Duchess of the Devils (1969) and Emergency Squad (1974). He died on 26 September 2002 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy.
- Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos DE Laclos was a French novelist, official, Freemason and army general, best known for writing the epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangerous (Dangerous Liaisons) (1782). A unique case in French literature, he was for a long time considered to be as scandalous a writer as the Marquis DE Sade or Restif DE La Bretonne. He was a military officer with no illusions about human relations, and an amateur writer; however, his initial plan was to "write a work which departed from the ordinary, which made a noise, and which would remain on earth after his death"; from this point of view he mostly attained his goals with the fame of his masterwork Les Liaisons dangerous. It is one of the masterpieces of novelist literature of the 18th century, which explores the amorous intrigues of the aristocracy. It has inspired many critical and analytic commentaries, plays and films.
- Writer
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Benedict Fitzgerald was born on 9 March 1949 in New York, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Passion of the Christ (2004), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and A Good Man Is Hard to Find. He was married to Krenz Mason. He died on 17 January 2024 in Marsala, Sicily, Italy.- Marcello Perracchio was born on 16 January 1938 in Modica, Sicily, Italy. He was an actor, known for Detective Montalbano (1999), La piovra (1984) and The Flower in His Mouth (1975). He died on 29 July 2017 in Ragusa, Sicily, Italy.
- Actor
- Composer
- Music Department
Domenico Modugno was born on 9 January 1928 in Polignano a Mare, Puglia, Italy. He was an actor and composer, known for The Batman (2022), Money Talks (1997) and Casino (1995). He was married to Franca Gandolfi. He died on 6 August 1994 in Lampedusa, Pelagie Islands, Sicily, Italy.- Actor
- Additional Crew
- Director
Turi Ferro was born on 10 January 1921 in Catania, Sicily, Italy. He was an actor and director, known for Malicious (1973), Mastro Don Gesualdo (1964) and Melissa (1966). He was married to Ida Carrara. He died on 10 May 2001 in Catania, Sicily, Italy.- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Tano Cimarosa was born on 1 January 1922 in Messina, Italy. He was an actor and director, known for Cinema Paradiso (1988), Uomini di parola (1981) and La sarrasine (1992). He died on 24 May 2008 in Messina, Sicily, Italy.- Actor
- Additional Crew
Guido Leontini was born on 21 March 1927 in Catania, Sicily, Italy. He was an actor, known for Tough Guys (1974), Il marchese di Roccaverdina (1972) and The Valachi Papers (1972). He died on 26 April 1996 in Catania, Sicily, Italy.- Luigi Maria Burruano was born on 22 April 1945 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy. He was an actor and writer, known for One Hundred Steps (2000), Il ritorno di Cagliostro (2003) and Liberi (2003). He died on 10 September 2017 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy.
- Giacinto Ferro was born on 22 November 1943 in Palazzolo Acreide, Sicily, Italy. He was an actor, known for The Passion of the Christ (2004), Il capo dei capi (2007) and Piazza Fontana: The Italian Conspiracy (2012). He died on 25 December 2016 in Valverde, Catania, Sicily, Italy.
- Enzo Maiorca was born on 21 June 1931 in Syracuse, Sicily, Italy. He was an actor, known for Fear Runs Deep (1976), Ambrogio Fogar - Il viaggio (1998) and Momentum (2017). He died on 13 November 2016 in Syracuse, Sicily, Italy.
- Music Artist
- Composer
- Writer
Franco Battiato was born on 23 March 1945 in Jonia, Sicily, Italy. He was a music artist and composer, known for Lost Love (2003), Children of Men (2006) and Musikanten (2005). He died on 18 May 2021 in Milo, Sicily, Italy.- Writer
- Script and Continuity Department
Leonardo Sciascia was born on 8 January 1921 in Racalmuto, Sicily, Italy. He was a writer, known for Mafia (1968), Illustrious Corpses (1976) and Bronte: cronaca di un massacro che i libri di storia non hanno raccontato (1972). He was married to Maria Andronico. He died on 20 November 1989 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy.- Director
- Writer
- Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Franco Indovina was born in 1932 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy. He was a director and writer, known for L'Avventura (1960), Giuochi particolari (1970) and Menage all'italiana (1965). He died on 5 May 1972 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy.- Michele Cimarosa was born on 8 April 1926 in Messina, Sicily, Italy. He was an actor, known for Ninì Tirabusciò, la donna che inventò la mossa (1970), The Brotherhood (1968) and Straziami ma di baci saziami (1968). He died on 15 February 1993 in Messina, Sicily, Italy.
- Nellina Laganà was born on 10 April 1947 in Syracuse, Sicily, Italy. She was an actress, known for Cinema Paradiso (1988), Detective Montalbano (1999) and La divina Dolzedia (2017). She died on 8 January 2020 in Catania, Sicily, Italy.
- Tenor Michelangelo Verso, born in Palermo (Sicily) in 1920, studied with tenor Salvatore Pollicino in Palermo, with Maestro Punzo in Naples and with tenor Giovanni Martinelli in New York. He started singing in various Eiar and Rai Radio programs in Italy, winning several awards. In 1942 he won a scholarship for acting at the "Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia" (C.S.C.) of Rome and in 1950 he was chosen winner of the International Contest of Perfection for Lyric Singers at the Accademia Internazionale Chigiana of Siena where he studied with soprano Ines Alfano Tellini. His operatic repertoire included: Rigoletto, La Bohème, La Traviata, Cavalleria Rusticana, Lucia di Lammermoor and Elisir d'Amore. He made his operatic debut in Palermo in 1949 with "Il Barbiere di Siviglia". In that same year his mentor and idol, Beniamino Gigli, invited him to participate in a benefit concert that Gigli had organized at the Teatro Massimo of Palermo for the poor. Michelangelo Verso recorded records for Cetra, Fonit, Columbia and other labels and was the first singer who was invited in 1951 by the Cetra record company of Turin to record the Sicilian song "Vitti 'na crozza" (composed by Francesco Li Causi) which became an anthem for the Sicilians. In 1952 he was engaged by Furio Rendine to participate at the Neapolitan song festival "La Piedigrotta" where he was awarded for his interpretation of "Campane Napulitane" (which soon after was recorded and released with other songs sung by him on Fonit records) and where the local critics quoted him as the new Caruso for having sung in public without a microphone. In 1953 he sang in concert with soprano Maria Caniglia in Monreale in the presence of Cardinal Carpinio. On the transatlantic liner Andrea Doria during his journey to New York, he was invited to sing in concert with the orchestra on board conducted by Maestro Bandel. Once arrived in New York, where he established, he did extensive Radio and TV work for WHOM, WEVD, CBS, and NBC. He was put under contract by the Pittsburgh Opera for the lyric season 1953/54 to sing the leading tenor role as the Count of Almaviva in the "Barber of Seville" together with baritone Cesare Bardelli as Figaro. In 1955 he established himself in Mexico where he performed with Josephine Baker at Teatro Iris and acted and sang together with Gloria Aguiar in the movie "Invitacion a Italia" sponsored by Good Year Oxo. His voice was also used in a Mexican film "Locos peligrosos" (1957) starring Tin-Tan (Germán Valdés), Luis Aguilar, Yolanda Varela and Paco Malgesto. He sang at the Teatro Bellas Artes of Mexico D.F. in concert with baritone Carlo Morelli and recorded several Long Playing records for the Columbia record company. In Cuba (Havana) in 1955 at TV Canal 4 he performed in the same program with Edith Piaf and at the "Tropicana Nightclub" he was in the same show with Maurice Chevalier and Nat King Cole. During the following years he toured and sang in several countries of North and Latin America, performing mainly for Radio and TV. In 1961 he returned to Europe where he toured and performed in Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. In that same year he made records with PhonoType, Zephir and Rifi record companies and participated in 1962 in the Sicilian Songcontest in Castellamare del Golfo where he won the first and second award with two new Sicilian songs "Carritteri 'nnammuratu" and "Saridda" which soon after were recorded and released by the Fonola record company of Milan. In Germany he was invited to sing for the AFN and for the NATO and in the Netherlands, where he established himself for many years, he performed in several concerts, TV and Radio shows. In 1984 he was invited by the soprano Rina Gigli, the daughter of Beniamino, to come to Recanati to give a homage to her father in a concert in which also tenor Ferruccio Tagliavini participated. Returning to his birthplace Palermo, Michelangelo Verso performed in many TV-shows and benefit concerts for UNICEF and made three Beniamino Gigli memorial documentaries for local TV. In 1990 he was awarded in Rome with a Golden Plate from O.I.P.E.C. "Omaggio a Beniamino Gigli" for his world-wide artistic merits and tributes and in 1998 he was nominated Honorary Member by the English Mario Lanza fan club "Friends of Mario Lanza". In 2003, three years before he died, he was awarded with a Silver Commemorative Plate by the town Council of Palermo engraved with the following: "Lifetime Achievement Award to Michelangelo Verso, clear and robust voice appreciated around the world by the public and the critics"
- Gregorio Napoli was born in August 1934 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy. He was an actor, known for La rabbia (2008), Sud Side Stori (2000) and Il ritorno di Cagliostro (2003). He died on 2 April 2010 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy.
- Francesco Sineri was born on 24 June 1912 in Biancavilla, Sicily, Italy. He was an actor, known for Suonno d'ammore (1955), Agguato sul mare (1955) and The Big Family (1973). He was married to Sara Micalizzi. He died on 27 December 2005 in Catania, Sicily, Italy.
- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Giuseppe Greco was a writer and director, known for La mafia dei nuovi padrini (2005), I Grimaldi (1997) and Vite perdute (1992). He died on 12 February 2011 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy.- Cinematographer
- Camera and Electrical Department
- Special Effects
Ennio Guarnieri was born on 12 October 1930 in Rome, Lazio, Italy. He was a cinematographer, known for La Dolce Vita (1960), La Traviata (1982) and Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972). He died on 1 July 2019 in Licata, Sicily, Italy.