Sanson, Yvonne

(1926-2003)

   Actress. Greek-born Sanson moved to Italy in her teens in order to study but within a few years had embarked on a career in films. After a small part in Giuseppe Maria Scotese's La grande aurora (The Great Dawn, 1946), she played her first major role as the mistress-become-wife in Alberto Lattuada's II delitto di Giovanni Episcopo (Flesh Will Surrender, 1947). She then achieved an extraordinary popularity as the female lead in a series of hugely successful melodramas directed by Raffaello Matarazzo, beginning with Catene (Chains, 1949) and continuing with Figli di Nessuno (Nobody's Children, 1951), Chi e senza peccato (Whomever Is without Sin, 1952), Angelo Bianco (The White Angel, 1955), and Malinconico autunno (Melancholic Autumn, 1959), in all of which she was paired with male heartthrob Amedeo Nazzari. She also acquitted herself well in supporting roles in films such as Lattuada's Il cappotto (The Overcoat, 1952), Mario Camerini's La bella mugnaia (The Miller's Beautiful Wife, 1955) and Rene Clement's La diga sul Pacifico (This Angry Age, 1956). By the beginning of the 1960s, however, her career was in decline. She appeared as Olga Manfredi, Vittorio Gassman's faded ex-lover, in Roberto Rossellini's Anima nera (Black Soul, 1962) but subsequently made few other films until Bernardo Bertolucci, perhaps in homage to her earlier popularity, cast her as Giulia's petit bourgeois mother in Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970).

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira