Liana Del Balzo
Most film careers narrow with age. Del Balzo's started there. Born in Buenos Aires and settled in Italy, she came to cinema late, in her forties, after years on stage and in operetta, where she met the tenor Guido Agnoletti, who became her husband. From that unusually late beginning she made around ninety films between 1935 and 1979 and became one of the busiest character actresses in Italian cinema, usually cast for comedy.
The credits gathered here are a fair sample of what that meant in practice. She is a banquet guest, uncredited, in Ben-Hur. She is a Mother Superior, also uncredited, in Come September. She is a rich Hebrew woman in Sodom and Gomorrah. The big international productions shooting in Rome used actresses like her as furniture with faces.
The Italian films used her better. She is Signora Dominici in Indian Summer, Madame Charrier in La Cage aux Folles, and Elvira in Deep Red, where a small domestic role sits inside one of the most stylish thrillers of the 1970s. She appears once more, uncredited again, in Luna in 1979, at the very end of a working life that had begun around the age most actors start thinking about the end of theirs.
Movies (8)
Where to start with Liana Del Balzo
Look for her in Deep Red first. It is the best film on the list by a distance, a giallo whose reputation rests on colour and score rather than plot, and she has a small domestic role at the edge of it.
La Cage aux Folles is the other one worth seeking out, a farce that was a phenomenon in its day, and it gives her Madame Charrier, a name that means something to anyone who knows the story. Indian Summer is the most Italian entry here and the one where she comes closest to a proper part.
The rest is spectacle with her somewhere in the frame: Ben-Hur and Sodom and Gomorrah are Hollywood in Rome at full volume, Come September is a light comedy with an uncredited nun in it, and Luna is a late, odd note to finish on.