I’m hearing reports that Italian actress Marisa Merlini died over the weekend, at the age of 84. Merlini was one of the great Italian comic actresses, and her career spanned from the post war period to the present day.
After her first film, Stasera niente di nuovo (42), she went on to appear in several films that proved succesful, most particularly Luigi Comencini’s Bread, Love and Dreams (53) and it’s sequel Bread, Love and Jealousy (54). However, despite her repuation at home, her name never really crossed into the international markets; partly because she was a supporting performer, who never really had any high-profile roles, and also because the majority of her work was domestically focused. In fact, among the english speaking world, she’s proabbly best known for the more dramatic roles she played in the 60s: as the sympathetic saloon madam in The Great Silence (68) and ‘Madame Vulcan’ in the Elke Sommer vehicle The Corrupt Ones (67).
More recently, she’d kept busy on Italian TV, appearing in a handful of saucy comedies (such as Sergio Martino’s Cream Horn (81)) and turning up in some more prestigious work (Pupi Avati’s La seconda notte di nozza (2005)).