Recent Obituaries, Classic Films Only

[CBHagman]

31. Actress Mariangela Melato, 71.

[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/arts/mariangela-melato-italian-actress-dies-at-71.html?_r=0[/url]

Mariangela Melato, an Italian actress who achieved fame alongside Giancarlo Giannini portraying complicated relationships in the provocative films of Lina Wertmüller, including “The Seduction of Mimi” and “Swept Away (by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August),” died on Friday in Rome. She was 71.

(SNIP)

Ms. Melato was already a successful actress when she first appeared in a film written and directed by Ms. Wertmüller, the Italian filmmaker whose work has challenged Italian social and political mores and depicted often vicious sexual relationships. Blond and throaty-voiced, with striking green eyes, Ms. Melato played the love interest to Mr. Giannini’s bewildered chauvinist in three of Ms. Wertmüller’s films from the 1970s.

In “The Seduction of Mimi” (1972), Ms. Melato played Fiorella, a jilted Sicilian wife who takes revenge on her adulterous husband, Mr. Giannini’s Mimi, by cuckolding him. In “Love and Anarchy” (1973), Ms. Wertmüller’s anti-Fascist drama, Ms. Melato plays Salomè, a prostitute and anarchist who helps a callow farmer, Mr. Giannini’s Tunin, in his plot to assassinate Mussolini.

Probably Ms. Melato’s best-known role in a Wertmüller film was as Raffaella in “Swept Away,” a sometimes harrowing romantic comedy of class conflict released in Italy in 1974. Raffaella, a haughty member of the Milanese upper class, is outspoken in her contempt for Gennarino (Mr. Giannini), a Communist Sicilian deckhand aboard a yacht she has rented.