NEWS… BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT
Gina Lollobrigida, among the last of the survivors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, has announced that she intends to run for the Italian Senate in next month’s general elections.
The star, who turned 95 on July 4, hopes to become a senator for the Sovereign and Popular Italy Party (ISP), a new Eurosceptic alliance party that launched less than a month ago.
Lollobrigida, who also unsuccessfully ran for a European Parliament seat with the Democrats, a centrist and socially liberal party, in 1999, said she was ‘tired of hearing politicians arguing with each other’.
The ISP, who are critics of current Italian prime minister Mario Draghi, was described by one of its leaders, Marco Rizzo, as ‘the only alternative against the liberal, warmongering and sanitary totalitarianism’.
‘I was just tired of hearing politicians arguing with each other without ever getting to the point,” Lollobrigida told Italian publication Corriere della Sera on Sunday.
‘I will fight for the people to decide, from health to justice. Italy is in bad shape, I want to do something good and positive,’ she added.
Lollobrigida maintained that she would ‘collaborate with everyone’ in the political world ‘as long as it is for the good of Italy’.
The retired actress also referenced Mahatma Gandhi as an inspiration ‘for his nonviolence’, as she mentioned being ‘good friends’ with Indira Gandhi, India’s first female prime minister, calling her ‘an extraordinary woman’.
First gaining fame in Italy at the age of 20 in 1947 after coming third in the Miss Italia pageant, Lollobrigida moved into cinema and made French and Italian films including Bread, Love and Dreams in 1953, which earned her a Bafta nomination.
After refusing a 1950 seven-picture deal with eccentric aviator, business man and director Howard Hughes, she finally made her Hollywood debut in John Huston’s 1953 film Beat the Devil with Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones.
Spending the next decade plus as an onscreen sex symbol, Lollobrigida’s other big Hollywood films included The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Never So Few with Frank Sinatra and Solomon and Sheba with Yul Brynner.
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As her film work slowed down in the 1970s she developed a second successful career as a photojournalist, photographing the likes of Salvador Dali, Audrey Hepburn and Henry Kissinger, as well as obtaining an exclusive interview with Cuba’s communist former leader Fidel Castro.
The ballot in Italy is on 25 September, and parties have until August 22 to register their candidates.
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