Valeri, Franca

(1920-)

(Real name Franca Maria Norsa.) Actress and playwright. One of Italy's most celebrated comediennes, Milanese-born Valeri came to popular notice in the late 1940s for her comic characterizations on the radio, achieving particular notoriety for her impersonation of the snobbish and opinionated young northerner signorina Cesira (Miss Cesira). Her characters soon migrated to the stage as part of the Teatro dei Gobbi, which Valeri helped to found and with which she toured Europe, and for the next two decades she also reappeared in various guises on many of the most watched television comedy and variety shows.

   From the early 1950s she also began to appear in films, making her debut as a Hungarian choreographer in Luci del varieta (Variety Lights, 1950) and continuing as the rich and spoiled Giulia Sofia in Toto a colori (Toto in Color, 1952); as Lady Eva, the pseudoaristocratic heart-to-heart columnist in Steno's Piccola posta (1955); and as the plainer cousin of Sophia Loren in Dino Risi's Il segno di Venere (The Sign of Venus, 1955), which she also helped to write. One of her most memorable incarnations from this period was as the shrewish wife and nemesis of Alberto Sordi in Risi's Il vedovo (The Widower, 1959). Although she continued to appear in films in the following years, most frequently in supporting roles but also starring at times, as in several comedies directed by her husband, Vittorio Caprioli, her first love remained the theater, and from the mid-1980s she worked mostly onstage, frequently writing and acting in her own plays. She returned to television in the mid-1990s as a regular in a number of popular situation comedies and miniseries such as Norma e Felice (1995), Caro maestro (Dear Teacher, 1996), and Linda e il brigadiere (Linda and the Sergeant, 1999). In 2003, while continuing to perform a number of her own plays on stage, she also returned to the big screen in an adaptation of her play Tosca e altre due (Tosca and the Women, 2003), an amusing take on the well-known opera, directed by Giorgio Ferrara.

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira