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Alida Valli
Alida Valli as she appeared in The Paradine Case (1947)
Birth name	Alida Maria Laura von Altenburger, Baroness of Marckenstein and Frauenberg
Born	31 May 1921 Pota, Istria, Italy
Died	22 April 2006 Rome
Other name(s)	Valli
Spouse(s)	Oscar De Mejo
Official site	Alida Valli

Alida Valli (31 May 1921 – 22 April 2006), sometimes simply credited as Valli, was an Italian actress.

Alida Valli was born in Pota, Istria, then in Italy (now called Pula, Croatia), of Austrian and Italian extraction on her father's side (his father is Luigi Altenburger from Trento and his mother is Elisa Tomasi from Trento, a cousin of the Roman senator Ettore Tolomei) and Austrian and Italian on her mother's side (her mother is Virginia della Martina, whose brother Rodolfo was a close friend of Gabriele d'Annunzio and her father is the German-Austrian Felix Oberecker from Laibach, at that time Austria (today Ljubljana, Slovenia)). She was christened Alida Maria Laura von Altenburger, Baroness of Marckenstein and Frauenberg of the The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia

At 15 years old she went to Rome, where she attended the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, a school for film actors and directors. At that time she lived at her uncle's, the Roman senator Ettore Tolomei. Beautiful, elegant and talented (with a sensual and melancholic glance), Alida Valli started her movie career in 1934, in Il cappello a tre punte (The Three Cornered Hat). The first big success came with the movie Mille lire al mese. After many roles in a large number of comedies, she could prove her dramatic talent in Piccolo mondo antico (1941), directed by Mario Soldati. During the War Years she starred in many movies, like Stasera niente di nuovo (1942) and Noi Vivi - Addio Kira! (1943), and became a movie star.

Alida Valli had a career in English language films through David Selznick, who signed her to a contract, thinking that he had found a second Ingrid Bergman. In Hollywood she performed in several movies: she was the murder suspect Maddalena Paradine in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947), and the mysterious Czech refugee wanted by the Russians in post-war Vienna in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). But her foreign experience was not a great success due to the financial problems of Selznick's production company.

In the early 1950s she came back to Europe, and starred in many French and Italian films. In 1954 she had a great success in the melodramatic Senso, directed by Luchino Visconti. In that film, set in mid-1800s Venice during the Risorgimento, she was a Venetian countess torn between nationalistic feelings and an adulterous love for an officer (played by Farley Granger) of the occupying Austrian forces. Her performance was vivid and passionate.

Her movie career suffered as a result of the infamous Wilma Montesi scandal, in which her lover and jazz musician Piero Piccioni (the son of the Italian minister of foreign affairs) was involved together with Maurizio d'Assia (Moritz von Hessen), the son of the famous Italian princess Mafalda di Savoia.

In 1959, she appeared in Georges Franju's horror masterpiece Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face).

From the 1960s she worked in several pictures with great directors, like Pier Paolo Pasolini (Edipo re, Oedipus Rex, 1967), Bernardo Bertolucci (La strategia del ragno, 1972; Novecento, 1976) and Dario Argento (Suspiria, 1977). Her last movie appearance was in Semana Santa (2002), with Mira Sorvino. In Italy, she was also well-known for her stage appearances in such plays as Ibsen's Rosmersholm; Pirandello's Henry IV; John Osborne's Epitaph for George Dillon; and Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge.

She died on 22 April 2006 in Rome.

• Alida Valli at the Internet Movie Database
• Alida Valli at the TCM Movie Database
• [1] Obituary in The Daily Telegraph (London), April 24, 2006
• [2] Obituary in The Guardian (London), April 24, 2006
• André Soares (7 June 2006). Alida Valli (1921 - 2006). Alternative Film Guide. Retrieved on 2007-03-09.