Considered the best film about making films, in “La Nuit américaine” (1973), Cortese played the role of an alcoholic dive by his first youth, notes Variety.
Born on January 1, 1923, in Milan, she remarked in adapting “Les Misérables / Caccia all’uomo” (1948) produced by Carlo Ponti. Cortese drew the attention of Hollywood with the role of the British melody “The Glass Mountain” (1949).
“With the death of Valentina Cortese, the Italian entertainment industry has lost the last of the cinema and theater,” said Carlo Fontana, president of AGIS (Associazione Generale Italiana Dello Spettacolo).
The actress died on Wednesday in her hometown.
She starred opposite Orson Welles in “Black Magic” (1949), Richard Conte, in Thieves’ Highway (1949), Spencer Tracy and James Stewart in “Malaya” (1949), and Richard Basehart in ” The House on Telegraph Hill “(1951). In 1952, he gave Serge Reggiani and Audrey Hepburn’s “Secret People”
In the early 1950s he returned to Italy where, in 1954, he co-starred with Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner for “The Barefoot Contessa,” by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
He directed some of them as Michelangelo Antonioni (“Le Amiche”, 1955), Gérard Brach (1971), Terry Gilliam (1988) and Franco Zeffirelli (” Fratello sole, sorella luna “, 1972,” Jesus of Nazareth “, 1977 and” Storia di una capinera “, 1993).
Cortese was married to actor Richard Basehart, with whom he had a son, Jackie Basehart, who died in 2015 in Milan.
