“I’m not that tall,” admitted Laura Antonelli, “I’m a bit plump and I have really short legs: who knows why men like me?” Yet fancy her they did, and for a generation of Italian adolescents (and their fathers) she became the pre-eminent emblem of cinematic eroticism.
During the 1970s, her films broke box-office records, enabling her to work in more serious roles for Luchino Visconti. As her allure began to fade, she was caught up in scandal and, by the end of her life, she asked nothing more than to be forgotten.
Aside from her buxom figure, often barely concealed by a negligée in the sex comedies that made her name, Antonelli’s appeal lay in her sensuality being of the reassuring kind. Visconti called her “the most beautiful creature in the Universe” but her beauty was that of the girl-next-door rather than the glacial exoticism that had made Anita Ekberg the focus of Mediterranean fantasies a decade earlier.
She was born in 1941 as Laura Antonaz in what is now Pula, Croatia, but was then part of Italy. When the Yugoslavs took it over at the end of the war, her family fled to Naples, where her father found work in a hospital. On leaving school, she moved to Rome and became a PT teacher. Her parents had made her take gymnastic lessons as a teenager because, she said later, her mother told her that she was “ugly, clumsy and insignificant”.
By her early twenties. she had found the confidence to take on modelling jobs. She made her screen debut in the mid-Sixties, and seemed to have got her break when cast as the lead in an adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs (Venere in Pelliccia, 1969). The censors, however, balked at passing the more explicit scenes and it was not released for another six years.
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By then she had become a star. In 1971, a scene in Il Merlo Maschio (The Male Blackbird) in which she was played nude like a cello by her musician husband caused a sensation and was an indicator that Italian audiences were becoming tolerant of more permissive fare. Their appetite peaked with the success of Malizia (Malicious, 1973). In it Antonelli played a housekeeper lusted after by a widower and his teenage sons. The moment when her character climbs a stepladder under the boiling gaze of one of the boys is now a cherished episode in Italian film history. Indeed, for all that the production traded on Antonelli’s charms, its tone was not exploitative and her performance was so well-regarded that she won the two major Italian acting prizes. Her fee shot up from 4 million lire, an average annual wage, to 25 times that figure.
For Visconti, who directed her in 1976 in L’innocente (The Innocent), she had that “mysterious qualitywhich I call charm, namely beauty plus intelligence”. Among those to fall for it was the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, with whom Antonelli was involved for much of the 1970s after he had left Ursula Andress and the end of her marriage to the producer Enrico Piacentini. In 1991, her star fell abruptly when police discovered 36 grams of cocaine at her villa near Rome. She was sentenced to three-and-a-half-years for trafficking and, although she spent only a few days in prison, she never recovered. At the time, she had been shooting Malizia 2000, a sequel to her greatest success, and had had collagen injections to make herself look younger. Instead, they provoked an allergic reaction, which distorted her features. When the film was released it was a fiasco and she quit acting.
Although she appealed against her drug conviction on the grounds that the cocaine was for her own use, the tortuous nature of Italy’s legal system meant that the verdict was not overturned until 2006, but by then she had become a recluse. Her main source of comfort was her faith, and when she was found dying of a heart attack she had a Bible in her hand.
“I never thought of myself as being particularly sexy,” she once said. “If I manage to communicate a kind of sensuality on the screen, it must mean that there is something in me which I can express. The important thing is to use it well and never let it degrade into pornography.”
Laura Antonelli, actress, was born on November 28, 1941. She died on June 22, 2015, aged 73