Actress Lucia Bosè died yesterday at the General Hospital of Segovia at the age of 89 from pneumonia complicated by COVID-19.
Born in 1931 in Milan, from Domenico Borloni and Francesca Bosè, the actress was discovered by Luchino Visconti while she worked in a Milanese pastry shop, Pasticceria Galli.
In 1947 Bosè won the Miss Italia beauty contest and had her big break in 1950 with Giuseppe De Santis' film Non c'è pace tra gli ulivi (Under the Olive Tree).
In the same year she appeared in another film, Cronaca di un amore (The Story of a Love Affair) by Michelangelo Antonioni. Three years later, the Italian director also chose her for the main role in another film, La signora senza camelie (The Lady Without Camelias, 1953).
In the film Bosè stars as Clara Manni, a young shop assistant who, discovered by a film producer, becomes an actress. In this film fashion is used to show Clara's progress from rags to riches.
But there is another movie linked with high fashion in which Bosè appeared - Le Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna (Three Girls from Rome, 1952) by Luciano Emmer.
This film that follows the vicissitudes of Marisa, Elena and Lucia, three young seamstresses and the movie was in part shot at the atelier of the Fontana sisters (Zoe Fontana has a cameo in the film), that was based near the Spanish Steps. Bosè starred as one of the three seamstresses working at the Sorelle Fontana atelier who one day gets the chance to star in a high fashion runway show.
In 1955 Bosè married Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel González Dominguin and retired from the screen after she had three children, Miguel, Paola and Lucía. She returned to cinema in the late '60s, after her divorce, appearing in Fellini's Fellini Satyricon (1969), in the Taviani Brothers' Under the Sign of Scorpio (1969), Mario Colucci's Something Creeping in The Dark (1971), Liliana Cavani's The Guest (1971), Giulio Questi's Arcana (1972) and Marguerite Duras' Nathalie Granger (1972).
She continued to be active in Italian and Spanish films and starred also in Francesco Rosi's Cronaca di una morte annunciata (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1987) and Ferzan Özpetek's Harem suaré (1999). During the last decades Bosè often appeared on television shows or in films in her trademark electric blue hair, a fierce hairstyle that she opted for as a sign of rebellion since, as she often revealed in interviews, she always longed to be different.
There are great connections with fashion in some of her films: in Antonioni's Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair), Bosè starred next to costume designer Ferdinando Sarmi who appeared in the movie as Enrico Fontana. Sarmi, who worked on the film with a young designer from Naples, Fausto Sarli, left Italy shortly afterwards, moving to the States where he became head designer for Elizabeth Arden and where, years later, he opened his own boutiques.
Lucia Bosè, was only nineteen when the film was shot, but Antonioni remembered in an interview how, after they dressed her up in Haute Couture creations and extraordinary jewels, she turned into a real lady. The lavish furs, the rich evening gowns and the avant-garde hats worn by the actress had a sociological purpose in the film: they had to highlight the emptiness, alienation and futility of the upper middle-classes who hid their loneliness, frustrations and banality behind luxurious items of clothing. In the film fashion and luxury are associated with the dissoluteness and perversion of the female protagonist, a stereotypical femme fatale.
In La signora senza camelie (The Lady Without Camelias, 1953) Bosè was dresssed by the prestigious Sartoria Battilocchi, an Italian Haute Couture fashion house founded in the 1920s in Rome by Aurora Battilocchi. The dresses produced by Battilocchi were famous for their precise cut, luxurious fabrics and refined details and were perfect to highlight Clara's transformation.
Exquisite and lavish fabrics such as satin and silk were chosen for the evening dresses Bosè wore, complemented by accessories such as leather gloves, belts and bags, while plush leopard furs by the Venice-based Riele were used as a symbol of the status Clara reached at the climax of her career. You can discover more about this film in a previous post about it or you can rewatch one of Bosè's films to get inspired by her stylish attires.
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