{"id":222499,"date":"2019-07-11T03:02:27","date_gmt":"2019-07-11T07:02:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=222499"},"modified":"2019-07-11T03:02:27","modified_gmt":"2019-07-11T07:02:27","slug":"valentina-cortese-italian-screen-diva-dead-at-96","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2019\/07\/11\/valentina-cortese-italian-screen-diva-dead-at-96\/","title":{"rendered":"Valentina Cortese, Italian screen diva, dead at 96"},"content":{"rendered":"
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FILE: Cortese in 2012 (Photo By Associazione Amici di Piero Chiara – Valentina Cortese, CC BY 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

ROME — Valentina Cortese, an Italian post-war screen diva who was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar but lost out to Ingrid Bergman, died on Wednesday. She was 96.<\/p>\n

Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala announced the death of the Milan-born actress in a tweet, thanking Cortese for having \u201cgiven us marvelous and unforgettable\u201d performances on the screen and stage.<\/p>\n

Cortese was a popular muse for leading Italian directors including Michelangelo Antonioni and Franco Zeffirelli.<\/p>\n

She garnered an Oscar nomination in 1975 playing a fading diva in Francois Truffaut’s \u201cDay for Night,\u201d a movie about making movies.<\/p>\n

While Cortese didn’t win the Academy Award for best-supporting actress, she was showered with praise by the actress who did clinch it that year: Ingrid Bergman for her performance in \u201cMurder on the Orient Express.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an elegant acceptance speech devoted to Cortese, Bergman said the Italian actress had given \u201cthe most beautiful performance\u201d in \u201cDay for Night\u201d by playing an aging actress who forgets her lines like \u201call we actresses\u201d do sooner or later.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m her rival, and I don’t like it at all,\u201d Berman said and gestured toward a smiling Cortese in the audience. \u201cPlease forgive me, Valentina.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an odd twist, the Truffaut film had won in the best foreign language film category a year earlier. But Cortese was only nominated the following year in the supporting actress category.<\/p>\n

Cortese won acclaim too as a stage actress. Her performances at Milan’s Piccolo Theater included roles in works by Brecht, Goldoni and Pirandello, directed by Giorgio Strehler, one of the theatre’s co-founders and a long-time companion.<\/p>\n

The theatre will hold a wake for her on Thursday and Friday.<\/p>\n

The theatre in a statement mourned the loss of a \u201csplendid, elegant, iconic\u201d actress.<\/p>\n

Cortese’s film career included roles in Federico Fellini’s \u201cJuliet of the Spirits\u201d and Zeffirelli’s \u201cBrother Sun, Sister Moon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her film career began in the 1940s. She stood out in a field filled with other beautiful and talented Italian women on the screen, including Alida Valli, Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren.<\/p>\n

But by the early 1950s, she had returned from Hollywood. She appeared in \u201cThe Barefoot Contessa,\u201d the 1954 Joseph L. Mankiewicz film, which starred Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart and which was filmed in Italy.<\/p>\n

In a 2012 interview with Rome daily La Repubblica, Cortese said \u201cI could have remained in Hollywood for who knows how long, but I never made compromises. Never was in a producer’s bed,\u201d although she claimed, without naming names, that \u201cbecause of a ‘no’ to one, I was destroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the same interview, she called theatre \u201cmy true passion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cortese married actor Richard Basehart, with whom she starred with in the thriller \u201cThe House of Telegraph Hill.\u201d Both Basehart, and their son, Jackie Basehart, an Italian-American actor, died before her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ROME — Valentina Cortese, an Italian post-war screen diva who was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar but lost …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":222500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","category-hollywood","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222499"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":222502,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222499\/revisions\/222502"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}