At 14 October 2010, Italian actress Carla del Poggio has died in Rome, Italy. She was 84.
Italian postcard by Casa Ballerini & Fratini (B.F.F. Edit.), Firenze (Florence), nr. 20030. Photo: Venturini.
Italian actress Carla Del Poggio (1925-2010) was the female star of Federico Fellini’s bittersweet film debut Luci del varietà/Variety Lights (1950). In the 1940's and 1950's she also starred in films by other famous directors such as Vittorio De Sica and her husband Alberto Lattuada.
Carla Del Poggio was born as Maria Luisa Attanasio in Naples, Italy, in 1925. At 15, while she was studying foreign languages and modern dance, she started attending the Italian school for performing arts, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia of Rome. Director Vittorio De Sica chose her for his second film Maddalena, zero in condotta/ Maddalena, Zero for Conduct (1940, Vittorio De Sica). This was not yet one of his famous neorealist films but a 'white telephone comedy' - a typical Italian genre of the 1930’s and early 1940’s: fluffy comedies situated in the upper classes. Del Poggio played the title role, a dreamy Italian school girl who accidentally gets entangled in a romantic affair with a young Austrian businessman (played by De Sica himself). She then appeared in De Sica’s Un garibaldino al convent/A Garibaldian in the Convent (1942, Vittorio De Sica), an old woman's poignant reminiscence of her youth in a convent school, the happy and sad moments, and her tragic love for a Garibaldian soldier. At 19, she met her future husband, director Alberto Lattuada, 11 years her senior, who chose her for a role in a film adaptation of the renowned novel Gli indifferenti by Alberto Moravia. The film was never realized, but they eventually married a few months later in 1945. She did star in his film Il bandito/The Bandit (1946, Alberto Lattuada) with Anna Magnani. Other films in which she appeared were Gioventù perduta/Lost Youth (1947, Pietro Germi) with Massimo Girotti, Caccia tragica/The Tragic Hunt (1947, Giuseppe de Santis), and Senza pietà/Without Pity (1948, Alberto Lattuada), an affecting drama of an affair between an Italian girl and an Afro-American GI (John Kitzmiller). The plot is based on an actual postwar dilemma: in Northern Italy, dozens of black American GIs chose to go AWOL rather than return to a racially divided United States. The following year Del Poggio also appeared in her husband’s Il mulino del Pò/The Mill on the Po (1949, Alberto Lattuada), co-starring Jacques Sernas and based on a screenplay by Federico Fellini. According to Hal Erickson at AllMovie: “The romantic plotline is placed in context within the events leading up to the famous Po Valley farmers' strike of 1876; characteristically, Lattuada offers a topical political slant to the facts at hand. As in his other neorealist exercises, Lattuada manages to bridge the gap between ‘art’ and box-office appeal in Il Mulino del Po.”
Carla del Poggio founded a co-op with her husband, Fellini and his wife Giulietta Masina. Together they realized Fellini's film debut Luci del varietà/Lights of Variety (1950, Alberto Lattuada, Federico Fellini), a bittersweet drama about a bunch of misfits in a traveling vaudeville troupe. The group of actors, dancers, and performers struggle to make it from town to town, playing to minimal crowds. Their leader, Checco Dal Monte (Peppino De Filippo) just wants his act to be a success. He meets beauty queen Lily (Del Poggio) and puts her in the show as a dancer. The infatuated Checco breaks up the troupe in order to put on a showcase for Lily instead, but his star-eyed discovery proves to be relentless in her quest for fame. In the early 1950’s Del Poggio could be seen in films like the spy thriller Les loups chassent la nuit/La ragazza di Trieste/Wolves Hunt At Night (1951, Bernard Borderie) opposite Jean-Pierre Aumont, Roma ore 11/Rome 11:00 (1952, Giuseppe de Santis) with Massimo Girotti, and Cose da pazzi/Crazy Affairs (1954, Georg Wilhelm Pabst) opposite Aldo Fabrizi. However, during the 1950’s she took part mainly in theatre plays. In her last film, I girovaghi/The Wanderers (1956, Hugo Fregonese), she starred opposite Peter Ustinov and Abbe Lane. Later she worked regularly for RAI TV, and in the late 1960’s she retired. Carla del Poggio died in 2010, in Rome, Italy. She was married to Alberto Lattuada for sixty years till his death in 2005. They had two children.
Sources: Morgan Magan (IMDb), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Hans Beerekamp (Het Schimmenrijk) (Dutch), Wikipedia, and IMDb.