Asti, Adriana

(1933-)

   Actress. One of Italy's most respected actresses, whose prolific career has spanned the entire postwar period, Asti made her acting debut in 1951 at the Teatro Stabile of Bolzano. Four years later she achieved her first major triumph playing the female lead in a production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, directed by Luchino Visconti. While pursuing her acting career on stage, she also began appearing in films in the late 1950s. After small parts in Visconti's Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960) and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Accattone (Accattone! 1961), she provided one of her most memorable performances as Gina, the protagonist's neurotic aunt and lover, in Bernardo Bertolucci's Prima della Rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964). She subsequently appeared, among other roles, as the wife in Susan Sontag's Duett foor kannibaler (Duet for Cannibals, 1969), as the daughter in Mauro Bolognini's L'eredita Ferramonti (The Inheritance, 1970), as Lila Von Buliowski in Visconti's Ludwig (1973), and as Felicita in Giorgio Ferrara's adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's novella Un cuore semplice (A Simple Heart, 1977).

   After playing Ennia in Tinto Brass's Caligola (Caligula, 1979), she largely withdrew from the cinema in the 1980s to again work mostly in theater, both in Italy and in France. With her stage career continuing to flourish, in the 1990s she wrote and directed several of her own plays and appeared in a number of Italian and French television series. She returned to the big screen playing a mischievous comic role in Giorgio Ferrara's Tosca e altre due (Tosca and the Women, 2003) before giving a very moving performance as the mother in Marco Tullio Giordana's La meglio gioventu (The Best of Youth, 2003), for which she shared the Nastro d'argento for Best Actress. More recently, while continuing to win much acclaim for her work on the stage, she also played the mother in Giordana's Quando sei nato non puoi piu nasconderti (Once You're Born You Can No Longer Hide, 2005).

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira