Gabriella Giorgelli

Actress and model Gabriella Giorgelli was said to have "the most beautiful eyes in Italian cinema". The daughter of a businessman and his home-maker wife, she was born in the small hamlet of Fossola, near Carrara, located in the region of Tuscany. At the age of ten, her parents separated and she was sent off to a Catholic college in Carrara. Five years later, Gabriella worked various jobs to help her ailing mother, including as a clerk, typist, secretary, barmaid and pizza chef. She also entered several beauty contests and became a Miss Italia finalist. However, once it was discovered that she had lied about her age, she was eliminated from the competition. Further work as a photographic model nonetheless resulted in a magazine cover which was noticed by the director Damiano Damiani and led to her first film appearance in Arturo's Island (1962). Her second film, The Grim Reaper (1962), marked the directorial debut of Bernardo Bertolucci. Gabriella was cast as the dominating prostitute partner of a pimp, one of several suspects in a brutal murder.

For much of the 1960s and 70s, Gabriella alternated second leads with supporting roles in genre films, including some eight spaghetti westerns, a number of sex comedies and the occasional art house film. She seemed to have had a predilection for playing unpretentious characters, once declaring "I'm not very good with dialects and I have often played commoners from different places." Her role as Cinzia Bocconotti in Bruno Corbucci's "poliziottesco" comedy Delitto sull'autostrada (1982) has often been singled out as one of her best performances. Her western leading roles have included Mickey Hargitay's love interest in Uno straniero a Sacramento (1965) and that of Giuliano Gemma in Long Days of Vengeance (1967). In a rare villainous role, she also co-starred alongside a typically maniacal Klaus Kinski in The Beast (1970) as one of a trio of crooks posing as a kidnapped heiress in order to collect a lucrative inheritance. Gabriella's last screen credit was in 1999.