Valentina Cortese obituary
In that film, Cortese, who has died aged 96, played Severine, an ageing star who quaffs champagne while working, cannot find the right door to enter or exit, and blames her failure to remember her lines on the makeup girl. Cortese was already an established actor with the best part of her career behind her at the time of Truffaut’s inspirational casting. “A real character, extremely feminine and very funny,” he remarked of her at the time.
Born in Milan, to a single mother who left her in the care of a poor farming family, Cortese was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Turin when she was six. She enrolled in the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome aged 15, and started in films shortly after – mainly costume dramas in which she played ingenue roles. It was only after the second world war that she was given a chance to reveal her acting talents, beginning with Marcello Pagliero’s neorealist drama Roma Città Libera (1946), in which she gave an expressive performance as a typist who, unable to pay her rent and facing eviction, becomes a prostitute.
In 1948 she starred as both Fantina and Cosetta in one of the many screen adaptations of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and played a concentration camp victim in L’Ebreo Errante (The Wandering Jew, 1948), an updated version of Eugène Sue’s novel.
These roles brought her to the attention of the British producers of The Glass Mountain (1949), a romantic drama set and shot in the Dolomites. Cortese played an Italian partisan who rescues an RAF pilot and composer, portrayed by Michael Denison.
So began her international career. She made several films in Hollywood billed as Valentina Cortesa, working for different studios and so retaining her freedom. The first and best of these was Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949), in which she brought a whiff of neorealism to her role as a prostitute.
“You look like chipped glass,” says Richard Conte as the truck driver enticed to her room. “Soft hands,” he tells her. “Sharp nails,” she retorts. According to Variety, “Even in a cast as effortlessly talented as this, Cortese stands out. Jaggedly beautiful and yet possessed of a warm wit, she fluctuates from animal seduction to cosy repartee in the blink of an eye.”
In Black Magic (1949) – cast as the faithful Gypsy friend of Orson Welles, portraying Cagliostro, an 18th-century hypnotist, conjuror and charlatan – Cortese had to play second fiddle to the insipid Nancy Guild. In Malaya (1949), she was the obligatory love interest, playing alongside the smugglers Spencer Tracy and James Stewart.
On a short return to Italy, Cortese appeared in Géza von Radványi’s Donne Senza Nome (Women Without Names, 1950) as a pregnant Yugoslav widow incarcerated in a camp for displaced women after the end of the second world war. Back in Hollywood, in The House on Telegraph Hill (1951), a richly layered film noir directed by Robert Wise, she portrayed a survivor from a Nazi concentration camp who assumes the identity of a dead prisoner in order to enter the US. Vulnerable but inwardly strong, Cortese interacts superbly with Richard Basehart, playing a man trying to murder her for her estate. She and Basehart married soon after the film was completed.
Destined to play tragic roles for most of the 1950s, Cortese was a refugee in London in Thorold Dickinson’s Secret People (1952), plotting to kill a visiting dictator. Audrey Hepburn, in one of her first substantial roles, played her young ballerina sister.
Basehart and Cortese settled in Rome and appeared together in Avanzi di Galera (Jailbirds, 1954). While he led a peripatetic existence, working in different European countries, she appeared in prestigious productions such as Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954), as the doomed nobleman Rossano Brazzi’s caring sister.
By far the best of her films at this time was Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955), which involved the affairs of five haute-bourgeois women, with Cortese giving a sensitive and subtle performance as a ceramic artist, the most serious-minded and talented among them, married to an unsuccessful artist. As one of the women puts it to justify stealing her husband, “A woman with more talent than her man is unfortunate.”
In 1960, Basehart and Cortese divorced. He returned to the US, leaving her with custody of their son, Jackie. Cortese continued to appear, usually hamming it up, in a variety of European co-productions with international casts including one of Mario Bava’s tongue-in-cheek horror movies, La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo (The Evil Eye, 1963).
Cortese also had supporting roles in Bernhard Wicki’s The Visit (1964), Federico Fellini’s Giulietta degli Spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965), Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Claire (1968), in which she portrayed a flashy costume designer, and Joseph Losey’s The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), as the spouse of Richard Burton in the title role.
Her Oscar nomination for Day for Night did nothing to improve her roles or the pictures she appeared in subsequently. Many were real turkeys, such as the disaster movie When Time Ran Out (1980). Her last role was as Mother Superior in Franco Zeffirelli’s inferior tearjerker Sparrow (1993).
In 2012 she published her autobiography, Quanti Sono i Domani Passati, from which Francesco Patierno made a documentary, Diva! (2017) – with eight actors portraying her at different stages of her life.
Selected filmography
L'orizzonte dipinto [it] (1941)
L'attore scomparso (1941)
Il bravo di Venezia [it] (1941) – Alina
First Love (1941) – Nerina Redi
Girl of the Golden West (1942) – Madge / Juanita
The Jester's Supper (1942) – Lisabetta
The Queen of Navarre (1942) – Eleonora d'Austria
Soltanto un bacio [it] (1942) – Maria Renda / Luisa Renda
Orizzonte di sangue [it] (1942) – Lidia
Quarta pagina [it] (1942) – Valentina, la sua segretaria
Happy Days (1942) – Marianna
4 ragazze sognano [it] (1943) – Enrichetta Dorlence
La carica degli eroi [it] (1943)
Nessuno torna indietro [it] (1945) – Valentina
The Ten Commandments (1945) – (segment "Non nominare il nome di Dio invano")
Chi l'ha visto? [it] (1945) – Luisella
Roma città libera [it] (1946) – La ragazza
A Yank in Rome (1946) – Maria, La maestrina
Bullet for Stefano (1947) – Barbara
The Courier of the King (1947) – Louise de Renal
Les Misérables (1948) – Fantine and Cosette
The Wandering Jew [it] (1948) – Esther
Crossroads of Passion (1948) – Maria Pilar
The Glass Mountain (1949) – Alida
Black Magic (1949) – Zoraida
Thieves' Highway (1949) – Rica
Malaya (1949) – Luana
Women Without Names (1950) – Anna Petrovic the Jugoslav
Shadow of the Eagle (1950) – Elizabeth, Princess Tarakanova
The Rival of the Empress (1951) – Principessa Tarakanova
The House on Telegraph Hill (1951) – Victoria Kowelska
Secret People (1952) – Maria
Lulu (1953) – Lulù
Jealousy (1953) – Agrippina (voice, uncredited)
The Walk (1953) – Lisa
Angels of Darkness (1954) – Vally
Marriage (1954) – Natalia Stefanovna Chubukova
Avanzi di galera (1954) – Moglie di Luprandi
The Barefoot Contessa (1954) – Eleanora Torlato-Favrini
Adriana Lecouvreur (1955) – Adriana Lecouvreur
Le Amiche (1955) – Nene
Il conte Aquila (1955) – Teresa Casati
Faccia da mascalzone (1956)
Magic Fire (1956) – Mathilde Wesendonk
The Rocket from Calabuch (1956) – Eloisa, the Schoolmistress
Dimentica il mio passato (1957)
Kean – Genio e sregolatezza (1957) – Fanny (uncredited)
Amore a prima vista (1958)
Love and Troubles (1958) – Marisa
Square of Violence (1961) – Erica Bernardi
Barabbas (1961) – Julia
Axel Munthe, The Doctor of San Michele (1962) – Eleonora Duse
The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) – Laura Craven-Torrani
The Visit (1964) – Mathilda Miller
The Possessed (1965) – Irma
Juliet of the Spirits (1965) – Valentina
Soleil noir (1966) – Maria
The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968) – Countess Bozo Bedoni
Listen, Let's Make Love (1968) – Lallo's Mother
Oh, Grandmother's Dead (1968) – Ornella
The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969) – Gabriella (uncredited)
Give Her the Moon (1970) – Madeleine de Lépine
First Love (1970) – Mother
The Love Mates (1970) – Eva
The Boat on the Grass (1971) – Christine
The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire (1971) – Mrs. Sobiesky
Chronicle of a Homicide (1972) – Luisa Sola
Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972) – Pica Di Bernardone
The Assassination of Trotsky (1972) – Natalia Sedowa Trotsky
Day for Night (1973) – Séverine
Appassionata (1974) – Elisa Rutelli
Tendre Dracula (1974) – (uncredited)
The Kiss of Death (1974) – Elizabeth Blixen
Amore mio non farmi male (1974) – Sabina Foschini
Dracula in the Provinces (1975) – Olghina Franchetti
Kidnap Syndicate (1975) – Grazia Filippini
Son tornate a fiorire le rose (1975) – Sabina Foschini
Nick the Sting (1976) – Regina – Nick's Mother
The Big Operator (1976) – The Widow
Jesus of Nazareth (1977, TV Mini-Series) – Herodias
Nido de viudas (1977) – Dolores
Tanto va la gatta al lardo... (1978) – Vilma / Leonilde Bosco Casagrande
Un'ombra nell'ombra (1979) – Elena Merrill
When Time Ran Out (1980) – Rose Valdez
La ferdinanda: Sonate für eine Medici-Villa (1982) – Caterina de Dominicis
Via Montenapoleone (1987) – Madre di Guido
Tango blu (1987) – Rachele Cigno
Young Toscanini (1988) – Comparsa (uncredited)
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) – Queen Ariadne / Violet
Buster's Bedroom (1991) – Serafina Tannenbaum
Sparrow (1993) – Mother Superior (final film role)
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