Virna Lisi.

Actress

Born: November 8, 1936;

Died: December 18, 2014.

Virna Lisi, who has died of cancer aged 78, was a blonde Italian beauty once described in a Life magazine profile as being like a combination of Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly.

After initial success in her native land, she starred in several Hollywood and big international movies, including Assault on a Queen (1966), with Frank Sinatra, The Statue (1971), with David Niven, and perhaps most notably the comedy How to Murder Your Wife (1965), with Jack Lemmon.

Lemmon's character marries Lisi's character while drunk, after she appears out of a giant cake wearing only whipped cream sculpted into the shape of a bikini. She speaks no English and Lemmon soon comes to regret the hasty union.

Lisi was a contemporary of Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida at a time when Italian actresses were in big demand for international movies.

But she felt she was being typecast in Hollywood and turned down the title role in the 1968 sci-fi fantasy Barbarella - opening the way for Jane Fonda, and by the mid 1970s her international profile had dipped.

In later years however she developed a career as a character actress and she won a Cesar (the French equivalent of an Oscar) and a Cannes Film Festival award for her performance as the nasty Catherine de Medici in the 1994 historical epic La Reine Margot.

Born Virna Lisa Pieralisi in Ancona in 1936, she began making films in her mid-teens and her perfect smile was used to sell toothpaste on Italian television.

By the time she went to Hollywood, she had appeared in more than 30 films, including the Alexandre Dumas swashbuckler The Black Tulip (1964).

She had to audition for How to Murder Your Wife. Such was the impact she made that more people wanted to see her screen test than some of Jack Lemmon's actual films, her co-star once joked.

Although she was fluent in French and Spanish, the only phrases she knew in English were seemingly "Is possible?", "Is necessary?" and "Poor Virna".

She might well have employed the last two for the scene in which she was covered with whipped cream, actually shaving foam. More was needed between takes and her husband stormed onto the set at one point to object to her treatment.

She married Franco Pesci, a builder and architect, in 1960. "My husband was not very happy about my career," she told one interviewer.

"Like most Italians, Franco is a very jealous man - thank God! After we married he tried hard to take me away from all this movie business." Eventually he relented and they remained married till his death last year.

Lemmon said: "Even though she didn't speak English, she had that twinkle, that 'Ah-hah, I understand' look... Not just a pretty girl, she's a great comedienne."

As well as Assault on a Queen and The Statue, she appeared in the comedy Not with My Wife, You Don't! (1966), with Tony Curtis, The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969), with Anthony Quinn, and Bluebeard (1972), with Richard Burton and Raquel Welch.

She is survived by her son Corrado and by three grandchildren.

BRIAN PENDREIGH