Betti, Laura

(1934-2004)

   Singer and actress. Betti began, under the name of Laura Sarno, as a jazz singer in musical revues but soon graduated to more demanding roles in dramatic theater, giving a particularly strong performance in an Italian production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible in 1956. In the early 1960s she appeared on radio and television and performed in a series of solo recitals (Giro a vuoto) in which she sang texts written by established writers such as Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini and set to music composed by Piero Umiliani and Piero Piccioni.

   After small parts in Federico Fellini's La dolce vita (1960) and Roberto Rossellini's Era notte a Roma (Escape by Night, 1960), she appeared ever more frequently, and in more substantial roles, in the films of Pasolini, eventually winning the Coppa Volpi for her role as Emilia, the enigmatic serving girl in Teorema (Theorem, 1968). She would play the more cheerful character of the Wife of Bath in Pasolini's I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972).

   Never averse to interpreting hard and often unsympathetic women, she played Fulvio's reactionary sister, Esther, in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Allonsanfan (1973) and the pro-Fascist Regina in Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento (1900, 1976). Ferociously devoted to Pasolini and to celebrating his memory, in 2000 she produced and directed Pier Paolo Pasolini e la ragione di un sogno (Pasolini and the Reason for a Dream, 2001).

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira