Laura Adani

Italian stage actress who made a handful of films. She was the fourth child of merchant Alberto Adani and his wife Pia Capri, and was born in Modena on October 7, 1913. Although she had no antecedents involved in the theatre, her two sisters had married into theatrical families, and her interest in the stage developed early. Her brother-in-law, actor Ernesto Sabbatini, introduced her at fifteen to Russian-born theatre director Tatyana Pavlova, who took Laura into her company. Within a brief few years, she had become one of the most respected and acclaimed stage actresses in Italy, appearing in leading roles with a variety of prestigious companies. In 1935, she and actor Renzo Ricci formed their own theatrical company, which was a success until forced to close due to the Second World War. In her company, and in others during the war, she played the classic leading roles for women, including Ophelia, Marguerite Gauthier, and Juliet. She performed throughout the 1940s and '50s in important plays such as Tobacco Road, The Typewriter, and Samuel Beckett's Happy Days (in which she also successfully toured America). She had made her film debut at twenty in Aria di Paese (1933) and appeared in only twelve more feature films (and a smattering of television roles) over the next fifty years. For director Giacomo Vaccari, she appeared in television productions of La fine della signora Cheyney (from Frederick Lonsdale's The Last of Mrs. Cheyney) and the miniseries La Pisana (1960). In 1947, she married Duke Luigi Visconti di Modrone, brother of the famous director Luchino Visconti, who had both directed her and acted opposite her in the theatre. She was widowed twenty years later. Two years later, she married a second time, in 1969, to Admiral Ernesto Balbo Bertone, Count of Sambuy, Duke of Nocera. With her second husband she went to live in a villa at the foot of Superga Hill, near Turin. Adani died at 82 on August 30, 1996 in nearby Moncalieri, survived by her second husband. She is buried in the Chieri cemetery, near her home.