Cobb and Richard Conte, and then, in Richard Thorpe’s Malaya (1949), with Spencer Tracy and James Stewart.īergan adds that 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 U.S. “She was cast in three films in quick succession in the first two years of her contract, all of them opposite top male stars.” For the Guardian’s Ronald Bergan, 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.” She costarred with Lee J. “Early reviewers described her gamine beauty and enigmatic Mediterranean charm as perfect for ingénue roles,” writes Paul Vitello in the New York Times. Zanuck, who immediately signed her up to a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox. Her turn in that film caught the eye of producer Darryl F. The following year, she took on her first English-speaking role in a British production, Henry Cass’s The Glass Mountain, and then another in Gregory Ratoff’s Black Magic with Orson Welles. She’d already performed in nearly two dozen films before she broke through internationally in Riccardo Freda’s Les misérables (1948), in which she played both Fantine and Cosette and appeared alongside Gino Cervi and a very young Marcello Mastroianni. Born to a single mother in Milan and raised by her grandparents in Turin, Cortese studied acting in Rome and began appearing on screens throughout Italy in 1941.
![valentina cortese valentina cortese](https://media.famigliacristiana.it/2019/7/roma-1973--valentina-cortese_2617842.jpg)
Having worked with several other major filmmakers besides Truffaut and Fellini, Cortese could have dropped any number of heavyweight real-life names. Her suggestion that she just recite numbers, ‘like with Federico,’ refers to Fellini’s practice of dubbing, which Cortese would have encountered when they made Juliet of the Spirits together in 1965.” “The trouble is,” writes David Cairns in the essay accompanying our release of Day for Night, “the perpetually squiffy Séverine doesn’t remember anything else, either, including her lines or the location of the set door. Séverine and Alexandre had once been lovers, and their breakup was a nasty one, but fortunately for him, she remembers none of all that.
![valentina cortese valentina cortese](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/760c4879-a9da-4de4-a2bd-5c79cf3d43f0_1.ae249def003fd45e6d9da3d75ae4d432.jpeg)
Truffaut had cast her as Séverine, a legendary but waning diva who plays opposite Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont) in Meet Pamela, the fictional production at the center of Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973). “A real character, extremely feminine, and very funny,” François Truffaut once said of Valentina Cortese, the Italian actress who passed away on Wednesday at the age of ninety-six.