Beauty Icon Italian actress Lucia Bose
First, her film career lasted seven years: beginning at nineteen, she left the movie at twenty-six. And when Lucia Bose announced her intention to resume film career, the general reaction of the press was bewilderment.
Thirteen years given to the family, and how she decided to return to the set after such a break? To start all over again – not a young prize-winner of beauty contests, but on the eve of her forties?

Since 1955, Bose has ceased to act. Newspapers that have married “Miss Italy” with the “great torero” Miguel Luis Domingin as a sensation of medium caliber, have since firmly forgotten about the actress. Her name only rarely flashed in the columns of the society chronicle – until, after the divorce, she decided to return to the cinema. The surging wave of a new interest in the former celebrity also brought out some realities, together with the inevitable husk of gossip and speculation in such cases.

On one of her photographs of 1969 – Bose with her three children. They are very similar to the mother, beautiful, dark-haired – sixteen-year-old Miguel, twelve-year-old Lucia, and ten-year-old Paola. It is difficult to recognize in the new Bose, a soft, happy mother, that star of the Italian screen of the fifties, which fascinated us with her refined, slightly chilly beauty, proud manner and enigmatic detachment …

But a year later the Italian magazine Epoca wrote: “Despite the thirteen-year break, Lucia Bose managed to occupy a leading position in the cinema.” The question that varied criticism in connection with Bose’s new appearance was resolved. She is a professional, an actress, and not just an asterisk, a model entirely dependent on appearance, a passive object for a movie camera.

The actress returned to the cinema. Among the works of Bose are variously diverse roles in the Felini’s Satirecone, in the adaptation of Pratolini’s novel Metello (directed by Bolognini), and in the Taviani Brothers’ Parable film “Under the Sign of Scorpio”. Also, in “The Morning Star” (“Winter in Mallorca”) – a biographical film about Chopin, in a pair with the English actor Christopher Sandford. There, she played George Sand. Finally, one more thing: Bose will be Emma Bovary. A happy event, luck, recognition? After all, she received a proposal flattering for any first-class actress.

To say that Bose “played”, it is possible only conditionally. Not having received a professional education, minimally armed with skills of acting technique, she, finding support in her intuition, lived in each film, pieces of time, pieces of life. Bose sought victory, where her appearance, her psychophysical nature, and her human being naturally fit into the film.

Her fortunes grew on the basis of some special naturalness of existence in front of the camera, “which sees everything”. … One of the most exquisite beauties of the European screen came to the cinema from the counter of the Milan bakery. The beginning of the way promised Bose a classic Hollywood version of the star.
One fine morning, Lucia wakes up the most beautiful and, accordingly, the happiest girl in Italy. Noteworthy, in the same national competition in 1947, Gina Lollobrigida also took the third place. The rest was taken for granted: a certain cinematic Santa Claus, the producer (director), would see her and skyrocketing, to triumphs and fabulous fees. Bose recalls the beginning of her career: indeed, soon after the contest a famous director approached her and said: “Listen, why not to try your hand at the cinema?”

For the first time the “beauty queen” appeared on the screen by no means in the royal guise: in a worn skirt, an old sweater, and rough homemade shepherd shoes. The debut of Bose was the role of a peasant girl in the film by De Santis “No peace under the olive trees.” Lucia Bose naturally becomes one with Anna Magnani, Silvan Mangano, Raf Vallone, and Massimo Girotti.

Later criticism will say that it was Antonioni who discovered Bose’s dramatic talent, in the film “The Chronicle of One Love”, where she starred in the 1950’s. Immediately after the movie appeared, the Avanti magazine wrote that Antonioni “made from the charming Lucia Bose an excellent actress who far outscored all the” femme fatale “of Hollywood.”

She starred in Antonioni’s films again, playing in the “Lady Without Camellias” (1953) drama girl, a former saleswoman, who got into the cinema by chance, but dreams of creativity. All her efforts are vain, hopes are illusory.

Acting “texture” of Bose, naturally, attracted directors of “hard style” – from Bardem, Bunuel (“Lovers of Tomorrow”, 1955) to Francesco Mazelli (“Defeated”, 1955). But, surprisingly enough, she was often invited to comedy roles in simple films about “beautiful but poor,” “poor, but happy,” and a small dream to marry a good guy. We saw her once in a similar film by Luciano Emmer “Girls with the Spaces of Spain” (1952). However, her comedy roles didn’t bring her real success.

Bose was the first to express the Antonionian theme of “total loneliness” of a person in a bourgeois environment. But if Bose’s meeting with neo-realism was too late, then the meeting with Antonioni was too early. And the worldwide success of this director, who came a decade later, he had to share with another actress – Monica Vitti.

Meanwhile, in 1956, when the “Death of a Bicyclist” made a triumphant march across the screens of Italy, the magazine “Cinema Nuovo”, citing the movie stars, noted that the national cinema obviously does not really need Lucia Bose. By this time Italian cinema began to become more and more frankly commercial. Its symbol became the “star for export” – Gina Lollobrigida. She was the head of the list of “Cinema Nuovo”, ahead of even Sophia Loren and Alberto Sordi.

Bose could not compete with Gina, although she was neither more talented, nor younger, nor more beautiful. And remember at the contest “Miss Italy”, where both actresses participated, Bose was the winner and Gina took 3rd place. Unfortunately, Bose didn’t fit the idols of commercial cinema: her peculiar, too serious, and human nature, apparently, was not too malleable. In fact, in the mid-fifties, “demand” for Bose was already small.

In 1999, in the city of Segovia, under Madrid, Lucia Bose, along with her daughter Paola and her son, the famous singer and actor Miguel Bose opened the Museum of Angels. The exposition of the museum is successfully demonstrated all over the world. Currently Lucia Bose lives in Spain.

Beauty Icon Italian actress Lucia Bose

Actors of foreign cinema, 8-1973.