ELSA MARTINELLI

(30 January 1935 - 8 July 2017)

The Italian actress Elsa Martinelli, who has died aged 82, did not enjoy a particularly successful career, except as decorative eye candy on a number of international film productions. After becoming a model at the age of sixteen, her cover shot on Life magazine prompted Kirk Douglas to put her in his film The Indian Fighter (1955). She then returned to Italy, married a count and raised her daughter Cristiana. She appeared in a number of Italian films, including Donatella, which won her a best actress award at Berlin, and was cast in the title role of Guy Hamilton’s Manuela, with Trevor Howard. Apart from several other (mostly forgettable) Italian titles, she was in Mauro Bolognini’s The Big Night, Howard Hawks’ Hatari! with John Wayne, The Pigeon That Took Rome with Charlton Heston, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Anthony Asquith’s The V.I.P.s, Rampage with Robert Mitchum, Maroc 7 with Gene Barry, Vittorio De Sica’s Woman Times Seven, Madigan’s Millions with Dustin Hoffman, and Christian Marquand’s Candy. In between Italian film and TV work Martinelli became a furniture and interior designer. After her first marriage was annulled, she married the photographer and designer Willy Rizzo in 1968. He died in 2013.

MICHAEL DARVELL