Baroness Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein-Frauenberg, better known by her stage name Alida Valli (or simply Valli), was an Italian actress who appeared in more than 100 films, including Mario Soldati's Piccolo mondo antico, Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case, Carol Reed's The Third Man, Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Grido, Luchino Visconti's Senso, Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900, Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans Visage, and Dario Argento's Suspiria.
By her early 20s already widely regarded as the "most beautiful woman in the World", Valli had a career in English-language films through David Selznick, who signed her to a contract, thinking that he had found a second Ingrid Bergman. In Hollywood, she performed in great successes and memorable movies, as Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece The Paradine Case (1947); with Frank Sinatra, in the first non-musical performance of the latter, The Miracle of the Bells (1948); alongside Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), regarded as one of the best movies ever made worldwide and the greatest British film of all time; and again with Cotten in Walk Softly, Stranger (1950). Through these and other movies she became a Hollywood star and gained international renown, often credited but with the cursive word Valli, which would become her characteristic 'wordmark' in America. However, as the actress couldn't stand the strict rules of Selznick, who, as it is widely known, used to impose total control on his actors, Valli managed to get her contract's rescission, though with the payment of a high penalty from her part.
She returned to Europe in the early 1950s, and starred in many French and Italian films. In 1954, she had great success in the melodrama Senso, directed by Luchino Visconti. In that film, set in mid-19th-century Venice during the Risorgimento, she played a Venetian countess torn between nationalistic feelings and an adulterous love for an officer (played by Farley Granger) of the occupying Austrian forces.
Valli's movie career suffered in 1953 from a scandal surrounding the death of Wilma Montesi, whose body was found on a public beach near Ostia; prolonged investigations resulted, involving allegations of drug and sex orgies in Roman society. Among the accused – all of whom were acquitted, leaving the case unsolved – was Valli's lover, jazz musician Piero Piccioni (son of the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs).
