In line with the most sensual Italian actresses, Monica Bellucci became ever iconic with age – also more daring. It began in 2023 with the one-woman show Maria Callas: Letters and Memoirs on Broadway. At the same time, the 58-year-old actress is preparing a television series on the life of Tina Modotti, a 20th-century photographer, actress and activist.
In various interviews conducted before the recent pandemic, Monica Bellucci confides in her relationship to beauty, her passion for comedy, and how her daughters helped her assume her role as a “working mom.” Back to the path of an icon.
Monica Bellucci’s Mesmerizing Debut in “Malena”
The new century has just begun when Monica Bellucci walks the streets of a small Italian coastal town, and moves through the hearts of spectators around the world. In a film directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, the actress portrays “Malena”, a woman too sensitive for her conservative city. The film nominated by the Academy of Oscars in Los Angeles in 2001 for its stunning cinematic cinematography, but the discovery of such a star is what made the film memorable.
Monica Bellucci was born on 30 September 1964 in Città di Castello, north of Perugia. She is the only daughter of Brunella Briganti, an amateur painter, and Pasquale Bellucci, owner of a road transport company. Her father called her “skiller” because she was already small, she liked to play characters. “My parents were good to me and supported me when I wanted to leave,” she recalls with emotion. “My mother was very young, she was only 20 when I was born, so I could talk to her about everything. When I left, she told me that I would never again come back; and she was right.” She describes her background as modest, but with strong human relationships. These elements are that she is also looking for in her work.
Indeed, the scope of the role played has never really given to the actress. “What matters is not the number of minutes I’m going to spend on the screen. I like moments of strength. Magic moments. When I get the chance to work with talented directors, I learn a lot. I worked with Emir Kusturica for four years and David Lynch for five minutes, but we had a wonderful time. Good filmmakers know what they can do with an actor, even if the actor himself does not know if he is capable of doing so.”
Undisputed beauty
The beauty of Monica Bellucci was quickly noticed: she made her first professional photograph at the age of 13 and a model for a hairdresser at the age of 18. She was a law student, but quickly dropped out of school when her modeling career took off and she became the face of Dolce and Gabbana: “They were already famous young stylists,” recalled she in an interview in 2015. “I made my first parades with them. Domenico and Stefano are friends, and when we work together, we don’t feel really like we’re working. We also share the love of Italian cinema and all these beautiful extraordinary such ladies as Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, Silvana Mangano and Monica Vitti.”
The relationship between an actress and her body
The actress, who will be celebrating her 59th birthday this year, quickly realized that she could use her beauty differently: “An actor is like a dancer,” she said in an interview in 2018. “Through our bodies, we express who we are. I have often used my body as an instrument to represent very different souls. Just, the instrument in question is not a piano or a guitar, but myself. When you give this part of you, it becomes very fragile; you have to protect it and find the people who will be able to respect it. I’m not ready to give anyone my pain, because when I prepare a role, I work with my own pain, with something very deep, even if it’s just a sham.”
She offered this confidence, among others, to Gaspar Noé, who showed her brutally violatedly in Irreversible (2002): “Sometimes my beauty was used by filmmakers to represent the worst things, where is there to be destroyed, to show the violence that exists in the world.”
Actress on big screens, but not only
Monica Bellucci has always been in the process of a new adventure as an actress, but she has long stood from the theatrical scene – until 2019, when she discovers the selections for the solo showMaria Callas: Letters and Memoirs. She then presented this one woman show at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris, then in Athens, Rome, Milan, London and more recently in New York. “He’s an exciting duet… the incredibly glamorous actress Monica Bellucci plays titled titled the glamorous soprano Maria Callas; a diva paying tribute to another,” writes The Guardian. Monica Belluc appreciates the fragility and sensitivity of the monkey born 100 years ago. “She had a brave life and followed her heart,” she said in the New York Times. She wanted to divorce at a time when Italy this was prohibited. She is still a source of inspiration today because, though she had everyone against her, she fought for her well-being.
Women in the cinema
Over the years, Monica Bellucci has been scrolling through numerous conventions. When she was chosen to star in the James Bond Spectre film, she remarked that “is first the time that a James Bond woman is older than the protagonist. It is a very modern concept to see it in the arms of an older and braver woman, it because proves that femininity exists if a woman ages.”
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