Sabrina Impacciatore

Impacciatore spent more than two decades as a working Italian actress before an American series made her internationally famous. The Italian filmography is broad and largely comic: Livia in The Last Kiss, Diamantina Papucci in Napoleon and Me, Mirella in 18 Years Later, Mara in Ever Been to the Moon?, Agostina in the country-house whodunnit 7 Women and a Murder.

Then The White Lotus, and Valentina, the manager of a Sicilian hotel who is paid to be gracious to people she despises and is spectacularly bad at hiding it. It is a comic performance made almost entirely out of physical tension: a jaw that will not unclench, a smile deployed like a door closing. The role in the show's second season earned her a Primetime Emmy nomination, and it did the rare thing of moving an actress from one industry to another without sanding her down first.

Since then she has worked in English without losing the register: Esmeralda Grand in The Paper, Elena Romano in G20, a part in Across the River and into the Trees, voice work in Kiff, and In the Hand of Dante ahead of her. She also opened the 2026 Winter Olympics ceremony for the Milano-Cortina games, sharing a bill with Mariah Carey and Andrea Bocelli, which is a peculiar career move and entirely in character.