East-German postcard by VEB Progress Filmverleih Starfoto no. 1101. Photo: Rizzoli Film. Lea Massari in I sogni nel cassetto (Renato Castellani, 1957), in East-Germany titled Träume in der Schublade.
Lea Massari, pseudonym of Anna Maria Massatani (Rome, 30 June 1933), is an Italian actress.
Born in Rome, in the district of Monteverde Vecchio, as the daughter of a Roman engineer, and also of Umbrian descent on her mother's side, during her childhood Lea Massari lived in Spain, France and Switzerland. Back in Rome, she enrolled at university and attended architecture courses in the early 1950s. In the meantime, she worked as a model and collaborated with the set and costume designer Piero Gherardi, a family friend, who soon introduced her to the world of cinema. With her aristocratic and refined features, underlined by her feline gaze and hoarse voice, on the set of the film Proibito (1954), where Gherardi also worked, she was noticed by director Mario Monicelli, who convinced her to play a passionate Sardinian girl, alongside Amedeo Nazzari and Mel Ferrer. The role of the sweet and in love girl was repeated with I sogni nel cassetto (1957) by Renato Castellani, where she was dubbed by Adriana Asti. On the occasion of her debut on the big screen, at the age of 21 she assumed a stage name in memory of her fiancé Leo, with whom she was supposed to be married, but who died in a tragic accident a few days before the wedding.
In the 1960s Massari took part in many Italian and French productions, playing increasingly challenging roles, mostly as a middle-class woman. She began to gain international notoriety alongside Gabriele Ferzetti and Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni's film L'avventura (1960), in which she played perhaps the most iconic role of the first phase of her career, that of a dreamy young woman who suddenly disappears. In the same period she was in the cast of other important films: La giornata balorda (1960) by Mauro Bolognini, Il colosso di Rodi (1960) by Sergio Leone, alongside Rory Calhoun, and especially Una vita difficile (1961) by Dino Risi, alongside Alberto Sordi and Franco Fabrizi. Although uncredited, she is notable in Le quattro giornate di Napoli by Nanni Loy (1962), based on a subject by Vasco Pratolini, followed by a participation in another war-themed film, La città prigioniera (1962) by Joseph Anthony, with David Niven, Ben Gazzara and Martin Balsam. In that period she received a special David di Donatello award for her performance in I sogni muoiono all'alba (1961) by Mario Craveri and Enrico Gras, based on a play by Indro Montanelli. In 1963 she was proposed for the role of Marcello Mastroianni's wife in 8½ by Federico Fellini, later assigned to Anouk Aimée; it seems that during the audition for this part the director was not convinced because of inadequate make-up by Gherardi. In the same year she starred with Francisco Rabal in I cavalieri della vendetta by Carlos Saura.
Since the early years of her career Massari was often paired with well-known French actors, such as Jean Sorel in the aforementioned Bolognini film of 1960 (La giornata balorda), Alain Delon in Alain Cavalier's L'insoumis (1964) and Valerio Zurlini's La prima notte di quiete (1972) (for which she won the first of her two Nastri d'argento), Maurice Ronet in Il giardino delle delizie (1967), a debut film by Silvano Agosti which was heavily censored in Italy, Jean-Louis Trintignant in La course du lièvre à travers les champs (1972) by René Clément, Yves Montand in Le fils (1973) by Pierre Granier-Deferre, Philippe Leroy in La linea del fiume (1976) by Aldo Scavarda and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Chi dice donna dice donna (1976) by Tonino Cervi. In 1970 she teamed up with Michel Piccoli and Romy Schneider in the controversial Les Choses de la vie, the first success of director Claude Sautet, for which the Roman actress won the Louis-Delluc award; she would return to work with Piccoli in 1979 with Le divorcement by Pierre Barouh.
Much appreciated especially in France, after having dealt with the scabrous theme of incest in Louis Malle's Le Souffle au coeur (1971), where she played probably the most important role of her maturity and which also cost her a sensational accusation in Italy for corruption of minors, closed with a full acquittal, in 1973 she received an Étoile de Cristal as best foreign actress. In 1969 she had also starred with Gérard Blain and debutant Teo Teocoli in Gianni Vernuccio's film Paolo e Francesca, released two years later. After appearing in John Frankenheimer's Story of a Love Story (1973), opposite Alan Bates and Dominique Sanda, and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Allonsanfàn (1974), opposite Marcello Mastroianni, in 1975 she was called to participate as a juror at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1977, together with Riccardo Cucciolla, she took part in the film Antonio Gramsci - I giorni del carcere by Lino Del Fra, which won the Pardo d'oro at the Locarno Festival. In 1979 she received her second Nastro d'argento for the role of Luisa Levi in Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1978) by Francesco Rosi, where she played alongside Gian Maria Volonté, whom she herself considered the best colleague she had ever worked with.
Massari has also worked successfully in the theatre, including in William Gibson's Due sull'altalena/Two for the Seesaw (1960), directed by Arnoldo Foà, and on television, as in Capitan Fracassa (1958), I promessi sposi (1967), in the role of the Monaca di Monza, I fratelli Karamazov (1969) and Quaderno proibito (1980); particularly appreciated by audiences and critics was her performance in Sandro Bolchi's Anna Karenina (1974), repeated several times by RAI. Her last appearance on the small screen was in Una donna spezzata (1988) by Marco Leto, based on the novel La femme rompue by Simone de Beauvoir and scripted by Massari herself.
Passionate about hunting from a young age, following the example and encouragement of her father, she reduced her artistic activity from the early 1980s onward. She appeared again in Giuseppe Bertolucci's film Segreti Segreti (1985) (in which she played the painful role of Lina Sastri's suicidal mother), to devote herself decisively to ecological and animal rights campaigns. An actress notoriously disinclined to be a star, shy and reserved, and often forced to live and work abroad partly because of her husband's work, she retired for good in 1990, at the age of 57. After that she rarely appeared in public and gave few interviews, refusing various invitations to return to the set, such as the one received by Ferzan Özpetek, who in 2005 wanted her in Cuore sacro, in a role then assigned to Lisa Gaston. Her last film, which had little success, was Viaggio d'amore (1990) by Ottavio Fabbri, based on a subject by Tonino Guerra, in which she starred alongside Omar Sharif. After retiring from the stage, she moved to Sardinia with her husband (married in 1963) Carlo Bianchini, a former Alitalia pilot. Following a financial crisis, she put her important collection of antique jewelry up for auction in 1994.
In addition to her campaigns in defense of animals and against vivisection, which also led her to support various dog pounds, her passion for the guitar and Brazilian music is well known.
Sources: IMDB, Italian Wikipedia.
