Lea Massari, the diva of modern Italian cinema, dies

Michelangelo Antonioni changed the history of cinema with L'Avventura (1960), the film that, above all others, marks the birth of modern cinema. Not least because, halfway through the story, while some friends spend the day on an island, one of them disappears, and it's never known how or why. Her fiancé, Gabrielle Ferzetti, and her best friend, Monica Vitti, spend the rest of the film searching for her, unsuccessfully, as they grow closer to each other. The missing woman in question was Lea Massari, who finally disappeared in Rome, at the age of 91, on June 23.

Before becoming one of the greatest icons of modern cinema, Massari had only appeared in three films. For the first—Mario Monicelli's Proibito , starring Mel Ferrer, in 1955—he had to swear to his horrified, bourgeois Italian parents that it would only be one, as an experiment. But that wasn't to be.

The diva of modern Italian cinema, who passed away in 'La Aventura', has died at the age of 91.

After La aventura, her feline presence would be called upon for four dozen European co-productions, straddling Italy and France, and even Spain. Carlos Saura enlisted her for Llanto para un bandido (1964), with Paco Rabal as a bandit; Mario Camus for the football-themed Volver a vivir (1968); and Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi for the thriller El perro (1977). She worked sporadically, determined to maintain a level of quality in her choices, with a certain predilection for film noir and arthouse films. In France, she began her career with The Freight Elevator (Marcel Bluwal, 1962), a strange polar –French film noir–, a genre in which she was prolific, appearing twice alongside Lino Ventura and under the direction of Claude Pinoteau in the thrillers The Silent One (1973) and The Seventh Victim (1984), her penultimate film, or falling in love with Alain Delon in the extraordinary The Insoumis (Alain Cavalier, 1964), which caused controversy for touching on the very thorny subject of the OAS and the Algerian War.

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Louis Malle, René Clément, Pierre Granier-Deferre, Michel Deville, Henri Verneuil, and Chantal Akerman herself were other French-speaking filmmakers who called her, although she will probably be best remembered for the fabulous Les à la vie (Claude Sautet, 1970). In that film, she was Michel Piccoli's wife. Upon discovering that her husband, in a coma following a car accident, had written a letter of separation addressed to his mistress, Massari decides to tear it up when she sees Romy Schneider, her rival, burst into the hospital in despair.

Film history. In his native Italy, he also worked with the very best. We've mentioned Antonioni and Monicelli, but he also collaborated with Leone, Risi, the Taviani brothers, Rosi, and even twice with the maestro Valerio Zurlini, the great villain of Italian cinema, with whom he shot Le soldatesse (1965) and, above all, the immeasurable La prima noite de la quietude (1972), which reunited him with Delon, also a restless producer, as he had previously done with L'insoumis. He was the most French of Italian stars.