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The Times (24/Apr/2006) - Obituary: Alida Valli

(c) The Times (24/Apr/2006)

Alida Valli - Enigmatic girlfriend of Harry Lime in The Third Man

At the end of The Third Man (1949), in one of cinema’s most memorable dénouements, Harry Lime’s girlfriend, Anna Schmidt, played by Alida Valli, walks away from his grave and the soft-hearted consolation offered by Holly Martins, choosing the memory of Lime’s cynical charm instead.

The hauteur of her demeanour at that moment was worthy of Garbo, but though English-speaking audiences only saw Valli in roles that required an air of Nordic reserve and the qualities of a femme fatale, she was in fact Italian and, in a career that spanned 75 years, demonstrated that her range stretched far beyond melodrama.

Valli made her name before the war in Italy in ingénue parts, but when David O. Selznick brought her to Hollywood in 1947, he thought that her patrician looks and air of repressed sensuality could make her a second Ingrid Bergman. Thus in The Paradine Case (1948), one of Hitchcock’s heavier-handed thrillers, she was a suspected poisoner for whom a barrister, played by Gregory Peck, throws away his marriage and career.

Neither it nor The Miracle of the Bells (1948), with Frank Sinatra, found favour with cinemagoers, however, and Selznick had already decided to lend her out to other studios when she made The Third Man (1949) for the director Carol Reed. Disillusioned by her treatment and, it was said, by unhappy love affairs with Peck and Reed, she returned in 1950 to a newly vibrant Italy.

She was taken up by the younger generation of film-makers — Antonioni, Pasolini, Bertolucci — and in 1954 gave the finest performance of her career for Luchino Visconti in Senso. Charged by a Bruckner score, this was a lurid, almost operatic study of the folly provoked by passion, as Valli’s Venetian countess descends through humiliation and moral degradation to the betrayal of her country, all for the love of a younger Austrian soldier, played by Farley Granger.

As it was released, Valli was caught up in a scandal of her own, the greatest of the era. In 1953, the body of a young woman, Wilma Montesi, was washed up on a beach not far from Rome. Rumours of a sex-and-drugs orgy in high society were soon rife, and fingers were pointed at Piero Piccioni, the jazz musician son of a prominent politician and, said gossip, Valli’s lover.

At his subsequent trial for Montesi’s murder, Valli stuck to the alibi she had given him, notwithstanding a hail of innuendo in the press. Piccioni was acquitted, but her own career appeared to be irreparably damaged. Not for the first time, however, she proved to have more resilience and versatility than her critics believed.

She was born Baroness Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein Freunberg in 1921 in Pola, now in Croatia but then part of Italy. Her father, a teacher and writer on music, was descended from an Austrian noble family that had once been wealthy tobacco manufacturers.

Alida took to acting young, making her screen debut at the age of 9 in a short English film, Gypsy Land (1930). At 15, she entered the cinema school newly founded by Mussolini at Rome, and having acquired a more Latin stage name made her first appearance on the Italian screen in 1936, in I due sergenti. Quickly, she became the star of what were known as “white telephone” films, the genre of light romances set among the comparative luxuries of high bourgeoisie life that reflected the conservative values of the Fascist regime.

By the start of the war, she had been dubbed “Italy’s sweetheart”, and having taken the lead in Manon Lescaut (1940), was awarded the prize as best actress at the 1941 Venice Film Festival for her role as the wife in a blighted marriage in Piccolo mondo antico.

The festival was another of Il Duce’s innovations, and there were the usual rumours that she had been his lover. That year, however, her fiancé was killed in Libya, and the next came the first indications that she had ambitions to be more than the Fascists’ darling. Noi vivi (We the Living, 1942) was based on Ayn Rand’s story of a love affair in post-Revolution Russia and, luminous as Giuseppe Caracciolo’s cinematography was, it could not disguise the film’s anti- authoritarian themes. The picture was banned by the regime, and the next year Valli retired from cinema rather than be subject to its censorship. When the Government’s camp followers fled north with the Germans, she adamantly refused to follow. In 1944, she married the composer Oscar de Mejo, with whom she had two sons.

Many assumed that the end of the Mussolini years spelt the end of her stardom, but neither this, nor her experiences in America, nor the end of her marriage could dent her popularity with Italians. By the mid-1950s, she had established a strong reputation in the theatre, as well as on screen, and was quick to spot the potential of television, even appearing in several episodes of Dr Kildare.

Though Hitchcock had wanted Garbo for The Paradine Case, he revealed later that he had had to give Valli no more direction than indicating where to stand. Her talent meant that she remained in demand for the rest of her life, finally appearing in more than 100 films, among the most notable being Antonioni’s Il Grido (The Outcry, 1957), Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959) and Bertolucci’s Novecento (1976).

She also featured in the disaster film The Cassandra Crossing (1977) and A Month by the Lake (1994), with Vanessa Redgrave. Her last film, La Sconosciuta, was made earlier this year. She was awarded the Golden Lion for her body of work at Venice in 1997.

Her sons survive her.

Alida Valli, actress, was born on May 31, 1921. She died on April 22, 2006, aged 84.

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