Lidia Alfonsi

Leading Italian actress of all media, born Lydia (or Lidia) Alfonsi in Parma, the daughter of well-to-do middle class parents. She briefly trained in accountancy before venturing on to the stage as a member of student amateur theatrical troupes. With "Gli amici della prose" she performed a play by Luigi Pirandello which won her a best actress competition in Pesaro. Having attracted the attention of one of the judges, the director Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Alfonsi was invited to join his company and duly made her professional theatrical debut in 1946. From 1950, she also appeared on screen, wrote and recited poetry, as well as writing and working in radio as a voice actress. Though acclaimed for her roles on the classical stage (including as Medea, Phaedra and Electra) she is probably best known abroad as a protagonist of peplum and swashbuckler films like Hercules (1958), Morgan the Pirate (1960) and The Trojan Horse (1961) (all starring muscleman Steve Reeves). Alfonsi also co-starred alongside Boris Karloff in Mario Bava 's atmospheric psycho- thriller Black Sabbath (1963) (her character coming to a sticky end at the hands of Milo Quesada). This was originally shot with the cast voicing their lines in English, only for the dialogue to be wiped, dubbed into Italian and subtitled. She had another first-billed role in Lady Dynamite (1973) as the eponymous heroine, exacting Sicilian-style vendetta in Palermo on the local Mafia don responsible for the murder of her husband. For the small screen, Alfonsi essayed the ill-fated 18th century aristocrat Luisa Sanfelice in a seven-episode miniseries. Alfonsi was named a Grand Officer of the Italian Republic by then-president of Italy Alessandro Pertini. She retired from screen acting in 1997.