LINA is about to meet her future maestro while working in a sheet music store.
“arrived” when—on August 16, 1954— her portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine. This tribute was quickly followed on November 15, 1954, with Gina on the cover of Life. After these epochal triumphs, Gina found herself in the position of not only being able to pick and choose the films she wanted to make, but being able to conceive and execute the material that she felt would best suit her talents. The production of Lollobrigida’s
greatest commercial success, La donna più bella del mondo (“The Most Beauti- ful Woman in the World”), is credited to Maleno Malenotti of Gestione Studios Internazionali (the film’s Italian dis- tributor), but its true producer was the actress herself. A canny, streetwise businesswoman, Lollobrigida chose the subject matter and hand-picked the screenwriters; she chose the songs best-suited to her own vocal range (arias from Tosca); she selected her co-stars (including Tamara Lees, with whom she had shared many scenes in Vita da cani); she imported a prestigious Hollywood director with experience in staging movie musicals (Robert Z. Leonard); and—leaving absolutely noth- ing to chance—she hired Mario Bava (who knew better than anyone how to honor her beauty on film) to photograph the Eastmancolor spectacle. In his long Hollywood career—which began as an actor in 1914—Robert Zigler Leonard (1889–1968) had pro- duced and directed dozens of success- ful entertainments, and had shown him- self particularly adept at melodramas involving stage performers: Broadway Rose (1922), Jazzmania (1923), Dance Madness (1926), Dancing Lady (1933), The Great Ziegfeld (1936), Broadway Serenade (1939), Ziegfeld Girl (1941) and In the Good Old Summertime (1949), to name several. La donna più bella del mondo was Leonard’s penultimate work; it was followed by one last film, Kelly and Me (1957), starring Van Johnson and Piper Laurie—a comedy about a 1920s vaudevillian who finds a talented dog that helps him make the leap into talking pictures.
