Laura Betti
Birth : 1927-05-01, Casalecchio di Reno, Emilia-Romagna, Italy
Death : 2004-07-31
History
Laura Betti (née Trombetti; 1 May 1927 – 31 July 2004) was an Italian actress known particularly for her work with directors Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci. She had a long friendship with Pasolini and made a documentary about him in 2001.
Betti became famous for portraying bizarre, grotesque, eccentric, unstable or maniacal roles, like Regina in Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900, Anna the medium in Twitch of the Death Nerve, Giovanna la pazza in Woman Buried Alive, hysterical Rita Zigai in Sbatti il mostro in prima pagina, Therese in Private Vices, Public Virtues, Emilia the servant in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema for which she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, and Mildred the protagonist's wife in Mario Bava's Hatchet for the Honeymoon.
Born Laura Trombetti in Casalecchio di Reno, near Bologna, she grew up to be interested in singing. She first worked professionally in the arts as a jazz singer and moved to Rome.
Betti made her film debut in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960). In 1963, she became a close friend of the poet and movie director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Under his direction, she proved a wonderful talent and played in seven of his films, including La ricotta (1963), Teorema (Theorem, 1968), his 1972 version of The Canterbury Tales, in which she played the Wife of Bath; and his controversial Salo (1975) ("120 Days of Sodom").
In 1976, Betti portrayed Regina, a cruel and eroto-maniacal fascist in Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento (1900). She also played Miss Blandish in his Last Tango in Paris (1972), though her single scene was deleted.
In 1973 she dubbed the voice of the Devil for the Italian version of William Friedkin's The Exorcist.
From the 1960s, Betti dedicated much of her time to literature and politics. She became the muse for a number of leading political and literary figures in Italy and came to personify the revolutionary and Marxist era of 1970s Italy.
In 2001, she made a documentary about Pasolini, Pier Paolo Pasolini e la ragione di un sogno. She also donated her papers related to their long friendship along with more than 1000 volumes and many documents connected to Pasolini to the archives of the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, thus creating the Centro Studi Archivio Pier Paolo Pasolini. This Centro, strongly wanted by Betti, owns also thousands of photograph and all the works of Pasolini: poetry, literature, cinema and journalism. After her death in 2004 her brother Sergio Trombetti has donated all the personal documents of her career to the Centro that has absorbed them under the name Fondo Laura Betti.
Source: Article "Laura Betti" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Irina (archive footage) (uncredited)
"Marx can wait" was something Camillo Bellocchio said to his twin Marco the last time they met before the former died at a young age in the heated days of 1968. This documentary is dedicated to his memory.
Herself
Franco Maresco celebrates the heritage of Pier Paolo Pasolini on the 99th anniversary of his birth through a series of exchanges with renowned intellectuals which were involved or influenced by his works and ideas.
Self (archive footage)
A portrait of Laura Betti with archival footage and stories of friends: Bernardo Bertolucci remembers Laura in "Novecento" and in a lost sequence of "Last Tango in Paris", Giacomo Marramao and Walter Siti dwell on the relationship with Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francesca Archibugi remembers a precious friend, Michelle Kokosowski and Jack Lang talk about the successful and mutual love for France, Piero Tosi and Paolo Poli remember her youth, Jacqueline Risset her private life, Valentino Parlato her civic passion, Renato Nicolini recaps her difficult relationship with institutions, Filippo Crivelli remembers the singer. Views that seek to reconstruct the figure of an exceptional artist, unusual and contradictory.
Self (archive footage)
An attempt to reconstruct the complete version of Pier Paolo Pasolini's segment of La rabbia.
Interviewee
Documentary about the making of Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales (1972), and particularly focusing on the many edits and cut scenes that were made before the film's release.
Presidente del Tribunale
The story of an unlikely friendship between two men: Giocondo, a wealthy upper middle class man passionately in love with Nono, a black strip-teaser who has ruined him; and the Snake, a male strip-teaser who has traveled all over the world on cruising boats, a tough guy made tougher after a treachery by one of his friends. They meet in jail, where they are kept for different reasons and a strong, brotherly link is born between them.
Usuraia
Madre Superiora
Loose adaptation of Italy's national epic, Alessandro Manzoni's “The Betrothed”. In war-torn 17th century Italy, shady feudal lord Don Rodrigo eyes young and beautiful Lucia, who loves—and is reciprocated by—commoner Renzo. The two lovers plan to marry in secret, but Rodrigo discovers it and they are forced to flee their village, becoming separated and each facing many dangers, includine the Plague.
Period giallo about a young cook who's accused of killing her wealthy husband.
Suora
Pavoncella
Director
Through interviews, archive footage and quotes from books and films by Pasolini, Laura Betti, friend, actress and collaborator of Pasolini, improvises as a director, making a feature film dreaming of Pier Paolo's words immersed in everything that has not involved him for a long time
Fernando's Mother
Anaïs is twelve and bears the weight of the world on her shoulders. She watches her older sister, Elena, whom she both loves and hates. Elena is fifteen and devilishly beautiful. Neither more futile, nor more stupid than her younger sister, she cannot understand that she is merely an object of desire. And, as such, she can only be taken. Or had. Indeed, this is the subject: a girl's loss of virginity. And, that summer, it opens a door to tragedy.
Herself
Giuseppa
In 18th-century Sicily, deaf-mute highborn Marianna Ucrìa is forced to marry his uncle Pietro, a disgusting old man, at age 13. She bears three children before even turning 16, when she finally gives birth to a boy. Despite everything, she'll find a way to emancipate herself from the oppressive social conventions of the time.
Dottoressa Trebbi
An intriguing look at a sinister web of power,linking politics and the mafia in modern day Italy.
Beatrice
In the Tuscan countryside at the end of the 19th century, Pietro, the shy son of a tyrannical landowner, falls in love with Ghisola, a peasant girl with no family. His father has her sent away. Years later, the two meet again: still in love with her, Pietro would like to marry her, but she has become the mistress of a married man.
Laura
Mario and Maria Boschi, a 30-year-old couple with small children, are hit by a crisis: husband and wife cannot agree on a party name. A colleague, also named Mario, makes an impressive speech, and Maria find herself increasingly attracted to him. She feels able to relate to him like she could to her husband in the old days. They spend the night together, and she falls ill. When she is asked by her husband to leave the house, she realizes that there may be a difference between real love and a vague need for understanding.
Sister Valida
Aida
An epileptic 12-year-old girl, Pippi, is hospitalized in the psychiatric ward instead of the neurological ward, due to an administration error. Out of this mistake begins the difficult journey towards being cured.
Laura
On June 30, 1990, in Rome, Marie Christine is getting ready to take her son Pietro and Paolo to their father for the weekend. As the Football World Cup is taking place in Italy, Rome is flooded with supporters; the traffic is chaotic and French-born Marie Christine, who works as a translator, finds a bag that belongs to Miriam, who must leave the next day. Marie Christine decides to find her to return her passport, but one Giuliano Ferrini tries to prevent this. So Marie Christine finds herself navigating through a hot Roman night in a city she doesn't know, among people she never dreamed could inhabit the same city.
Catherine de Medicis
Despite being busy with his profession of soldiery, Brantome manages to find much more time for amorous dalliances with the ladies of the 16th-century French court than for battles. Unfortunately for him, his true love, Victoire, is beyond his reach most of the time. He more than compensates for this in the arms of others.
Olympia
A miraculous mushroom is discovered by a film director's daughter.It would be used to cure an actress.
Milena
Ferruccio, who knows everything about camels, and Camillo, who acts as his manager, go to Milan to take part in a telequiz.
Lardy
The interests, obsessions, and fantasies of two singular artists converge in this inspired collaboration between Agnès Varda and her longtime friend the actor Jane Birkin. Made over the course of a year and motivated by Birkin’s fortieth birthday—a milestone she admits to some anxiety over—Jane B. by Agnès V. contrasts the private, reflective Birkin with Birkin the icon.
Keli
Molinat is assigned to the case of a man found with a bullet in his ear on the shore of a little Atlantic coast resort he knows well. Indeed, he used to live there before his wife disappeared at sea, never to be found again. As the ocean rejects a new corpse everyday, the mystery thickens and the list of potential suspects grows longer. This slows Molinat's progress as much as the cumbersome Leroyer, sent in to spy on him and hopefully impede his progress. The tension mounts and the ring involving the three young ladies in the grey mansion, the village idiot and the real estate agent starts spinning out of control.
Mademoiselle von Planta
A journalist is assigned to interview an eccentric anthropologist who has exhumed the skeleton of Jörg Jenatsch, a revered freedom fighter who was mysteriously murdered in 1639. Initially disinterested, the journalist begins to uncover unflattering truths about the national hero and experiences visions in which he seems to be witnessing events that transpired over 300 years ago. As he obsessively pursues the investigation, his personal life and his grip on reality disintegrate, drawing him relentlessly toward the fatal carnival at which Jenatsch was killed.
Jolanda
A serial killer is terrifying the prostitutes in a big Italian city. After few barbaric murdering four prostitutes Lena, Angela, Nadine and Stella decide to unify and try to self-defend themselves. The police and all the other prostitutes agree with the four and the hunting is open. Who is the cruel killer?
Lidia Corradi
Based on the story of the woman recently brought to trial on charges of moral plagiarism and witchcraft.
direttrice
A former convict discovers that his son has been adopted by a couple living on the mountains and tries to establish a contact with him
Brunelda
A young man, recently arrived in New York from Europe, becomes swept up in a series of events that are beyond his knowledge or control.
Clio
Young student Claudine has a dream in which the Roman student Cornelius, fascinated by the beautiful wife of the commander, attends lectures on the art of love of great Ovid. Ancient tragedy repeats itself in a few centuries ...
Virginia Capacelli
During the French Revolution, a surprising company shares a coach, trying to catch up something - the time itself, perhaps.
Madame Hanska
Christian, an art critic, must write a study on the painter René Dimanche in order to understand why he did not produce anything for eight years. He asks his friend Ingrid to help him break through this mystery.
Self
Philo Bregstein tells us this film looks at Pasolini's life and art to explain why he died. The film traces Pasolini's life chronologically - family roots, hiding during World War II, teaching, moving to Rome, being arrested and acquitted many times, publishing poems, getting into film, being provocative, and being murdered. Interviews with Alberto Moravia, Laura Betti, Maria Antonietta Macciocch, and Bernard Bertolucci are inter-cut with readings of Pasolini's poems and with clips from four films - primarily the Gospel According to St. Matthew - to illustrate his changing ideas and points of view. Bregstein makes a case for Pasolini's being lynched.
Self
Traces the life of Anna Magnani, her creations, her successes, her triumphs, her boycotted career, her nonconformism, her anxieties, her generosity ... Punctuated with photos that tell her career in theater and cinema, Extracts of films, this documentary portrait also gives the floor to his friends and relatives, from Roberto Rossellini to Marcello Mastroianni, through Federico Fellini.
La signora Bondi
The action takes place in Florence in the 1930s. Alfred, an Englishman who moved to that city in order to write a book on Giotto, meets a boy who is fond of music and mathematics, with whom he becomes close friends. Alfred goes to Switzerland, but one day he receives an anguished letter from the boy and rushes back to Florence where he learns some terrible news.
Calogera
Laura
American actress on vacation in Italy falls for her friend's married Italian lover.
Madame Carrabo
On a stopover in Barcelona, Fériaud Roland discovers a corpse in the hotel room next door. He wakes up in a strange clinic without remembering who brought him there. The doctor insists he hallucinated, but it's not long before he obtains evidence that it wasn't a dream.
Jacqueline
Playwright Charles Watson entertains his niece Lily by telling her about the adventures of Philibert.Both these people have something to do with Philibert.
Irina
A young writer is trapped between his awful actress mother and the knowledge that he has only a mediocre talent as a playwright and almost no force of character.
Felicia
In 1945, as World War Two comes to a close, five small time crooks unite to form a gang. After several bold robberies they become notorious as "the front-wheel drive gang". The police attempt to stop their crime spree with little success, but how long will their luck last?
Regina
The epic tale of a class struggle in twentieth century Italy, as seen through the eyes of two childhood friends on opposing sides.
Teresa
The setting is a Central European kingdom, near the turn of the century. Bored by his very proper wife, the youthful heir to the throne spends his time in amorous dalliances at a sprawling country estate. His wife departs at the arrival of his friends, and they organize a celebration which becomes a wild orgy and culminates in death and tragedy.
Elle-même
Director
Self
Léonore
An elderly millionaire manipulates an avant-garde writer and a happily married man.
Tisa Borghi
Based on a true incident, this tells the story of a troubled young man who kills his sister's reactionary, violent and abusive husband and is eventually arrested for the murder. However, the dead husband happened to be a member of the Italian nobility, and the trial starts to turn into more of a prosecution of the defendant's socialist politics and the activities of his father, a well known liberal social reformer, than the actual crime itself.
Esther Imbriani
After the 1815 Restoration, an aging revolutionary finds himself reluctantly involved in an attempted insurrection in Southern Italy while growing increasingly disillusioned with his cause.
Rosalia Scuderi
Italian coming of age story about two cousins, Enzo and Agata, told in three stages.
Clara
A man receives a telegram that his father is dying, and travels with his wife to his hometown. They discover that the telegram is untrue, and set out to find who sent the message and why.
Giovanna la Pazza
Duke Philippe married Cristina, daughter of a fisherman. But his brothers, seeing that these after marriage they would miss out inheritance, decide to get rid of the woman by imprisoning her in a tower and making the duke believe she died.
Rita Zigai
1972, Milan. Just a few days before the general elections, a young girl from an esteemed family is raped and murdered. Bizanti, editor-in-chief of a conservative newspaper, tries to derail the official police investigation in order to help the right-wing candidates supported by his boss to win the elections.
The Wife from Bath
Glimpses of Chaucer penning his famous work are sprinkled through this re-enactment of several of his stories.
Betty
Jed (Tomas Milian) is an unlikely hero in this Italian western. As thoroughly unlikeable a robber as ever walked the West, he nonetheless robs from the rich and gives to the poor. Not only is he a murderous, ill-tempered sort, he is bad-mannered, too. When Sonny (Susan George) decides he should be her man and teach her how to be a proper outlaw, sparks fly.
Franco's Mother
In 1958 Angelo, a rich and spoiled boy, enters a religious school, where students are tired of its vice-rector, and the strict rules and old-fashioned teaching methods of priests. Soon, Angelo exerts strong leadership among his peers and incites turmoil among them, helped by intellectual Franco and shy Camma. They expel the prefect from the school, organize a Grand Guignol show, and disappear the corpse of an old professor.
Additional Writing
An elderly heiress is killed by her husband who wants control of her fortunes. What ensues is an all-out murder spree as relatives and friends attempt to reduce the inheritance playing field, complicated by some teenagers who decide to camp out in a dilapidated building on the estate.
Anna Fossati
An elderly heiress is killed by her husband who wants control of her fortunes. What ensues is an all-out murder spree as relatives and friends attempt to reduce the inheritance playing field, complicated by some teenagers who decide to camp out in a dilapidated building on the estate.
Sister
James Garner is Luther Sledge, the leader of a pack of rebels who are planning to steal a stash of gold. But after the thieves actually manage to get away with the bounty, they soon discover that the enemy lies within their midst. As they begin to bicker over who should get the biggest cut, the stage is set for a deadly showdown. Claude Akins and John Marley co-star in this Italian Western directed by Vic Morrow.
This lysergically madcap Italian flick largely eschews any traditional plot. The most noticeable thread involves ventriloquist Ricky becoming a TV star, dressed up as a superhero with an “impish robot” dummy.
Writer
This lysergically madcap Italian flick largely eschews any traditional plot. The most noticeable thread involves ventriloquist Ricky becoming a TV star, dressed up as a superhero with an “impish robot” dummy.
Screenplay
A madman haunted by the ghost of his ex-wife carves a corpse-laden trail.
Mildred Harrington
A madman haunted by the ghost of his ex-wife carves a corpse-laden trail.
In all of his work, Bussotti makes frequent reference to the body, to sexuality. This to remind musicians — especially classically trained ones — that they are not body-less angels, that they are not just their musical thoughts, that they are still, in the last analysis, flesh and bones. Thus the erotic is not for shocking, but to stress that making music involves the body in a very direct way.
Paulina leaves the apartment where she lives with her two brothers, Nicolas and Olivier. Her departure is mark by chaotic and sometimes violent confrontations.
Donna
The tragic and self-destructive sexual battle between a man and his wife. A drama for the desperate struggle of those who are different against the normality that rejects the margins. The couple is preparing to consume a relationship of extreme sadomasochism. Recorded theatre production.
Emilia, the Servant
A wealthy Italian household is turned upside down when a handsome stranger arrives, seduces every family member and then disappears. Each has an epiphany of sorts, but none can figure out who the seductive visitor was or why he came.
Desdemona
The film consists of six short stories created by different directors, but all the stories share one thing: a warm irony to current events.
Desdemona
Some puppets come to life in a theater with no windows. This time the puppets interpret William Shakespeare's Othello.
Jocasta's Maid (uncredited)
In pre-war Italy, a young couple have a baby boy. The father, however, is jealous of his son - and the scene moves to antiquity, where the baby is taken into the desert to be killed. He is rescued, given the name Edipo (Oedipus), and brought up by the King and Queen of Corinth as their son. One day an oracle informs Edipo that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he flees Corinth and his supposed parents - only to get into a fight and kill an older man on the road...
Male Tourist
Five short stories loosely dealing with the roles of women in society. A superstar actress travels to a mountain resort, only to evoke jealousy from women and lust from men. A woman offers to take an injured man to the hospital. A widowed father and his son seek for a new wife/mother. A man seeks revenge for a woman's honor. A bored housewife tries to explain to her husband that he's not as romantic as he used to be.
un turista
Ciancicato Miao and his son, after the death of his wife and mother by mushroom poisoning, are dedicated to find her replacement and have no luck until they find a mysterious deaf mute green-haired woman.
Self
A documentary highlighting some of the oddest, strangest and more grotesque examples of human behavior. Included are a tour of the Grand Guignol theater in Paris, a man who sticks long needles through his body, reindeer being castrated, and footage of lesbians and strippers.
Sonia, the 'Diva' (segment "La ricotta")
Four short films by four different directors dealing with the principles of modern life.
Teresa
In Nazi-occupied Rome, a beautiful bootlegger, to the chagrin of her lover, gives sanctuary to three escaped POWs: an American pilot, a Russian sergeant and a British major.
The Painter
A lawyer heads out on the road in an attempt to find his daughter who has been missing for quite some time. To help him navigate the secret world his daughter lived within that he knows nothing about, he recruits the help of Irene a close friend of his daughter's. But Irene has plans of her own.
Laura
Journalist and man-about-town Marcello struggles to find his place in the world, torn between the allure of Rome's elite social scene and the stifling domesticity offered by his girlfriend, all the while searching for a way to become a serious writer.
