LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Alida Valli
built 630 days ago
From All Movie Guide: Born in Italy, Alida Valli (often billed simply as Valli) was the daughter of an Austrian journalist. Possessed of a haunting beauty even at an early age, Valli began her European film career when she was 15, after brief formal training. Though few of her Italian starring films have stood the test of time, she remained popular throughout the early 1940s. When she refused to make any more films for Italy's fascist regime, she had to virtually go into hiding to avoid arrest and execution (ironically, her mother was shot as a collaborator by anti-fascists in 1945). After the war, Valli and her then-husband, composer Oscar de Mejo, came to Hollywood at the invitation of producer David O. Selznick. Signed to a contract, she spent most of her Selznick years on loanouts, starring in such trivialities as Miracle of the Bells (1947).
Source:
Born in Italy, Alida Valli (often billed simply as Valli) was the daughter of an Austrian journalist. Possessed of a haunting beauty even at an early age, Valli began her European film career when she was 15, after brief formal training. Though few of her Italian starring films have stood the test...Read More
Source:
The real reason to watch this film is to see Alida Valli play Joan of Arc, in a "film within a film" segment. She is luminous and incredibly beautiful, and would have made a terrific Joan. Coincidentally, the lavish "Joan of Arc" production starring Ingrid Bergman was released the same year as this film.
Source:
With all her on-screen success, Alida Valli’s personal life was often rocky. In 1944 she married the surrealist painter and jazz composer Oscar de Mejo. The newly married couple then moved to the United States. Their marriage ended some years later. Valli’s Italian mother died in Como in 1978.
Source:
Alida Valli was born in the Adriatic harbor town of Pula in the Italian province of Pola on May 31, 1921. At the time, this region, on a peninsula known as Istria (Istrien in German), had only been part of Italy for three years. In 1947 it became part of Yugoslavia and it now belongs to Croatia (Kroatien). Istria was under Austrian rule from 1797 until 1918 and the end of the First World War. Alida Valli was born Alida Maria Laura von Altenburger. Her father was an Austrian baron and philosophy professor who was married to an Italian.
Source:
Onscreen since age 14, Ms. Valli had her first starring role in Max Neufeld's comedy "Mille Lire al Mese" (1939) as a beauty with too many worshipers. She won an acting award at the Venice Film Festival for "Piccolo Mondo Antico" (1941), about a woman traumatized by her child's death; played a counterrevolutionary in a version of Ayn Rand's anti-Communist novel "We the Living" (1942); and had the title role in a filmed version of Balzac's "Eugenia Grandet" (1947).
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Alida Valli