Cat. #0052532: ALIDA VALLI

Scarce vintage signature in green ink, adding her best wishes in Italian, on a 3x5-inch tan card, acquired in 1972 and decorated with a small magazine image.  In good condition.  The hauntingly beautiful leading lady made her earliest films in her native Italy, but was forced to abandon acting and go into hiding with the onset of the Fascist regime of the 1940s.  After the war, she and then-husband composer Oscar de Mejo relocated to Hollywood at the invitation of David O. Selznick, who proceeded to loan her out to assorted studios for trivialities like Miracle of the Bells (1947).  Typically cast as worldly-wise adventuresses of ambivalent sexual tastes, her best work during this period included her portrayal of an accused murderess in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947), Anna Schmidt in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) and Countess Serpieri in Senso (1954).  Her career was temporarily stalled by an infamous sex-drug-murder scandal in 1954, but she ultimately got back on her feet, increasingly confining herself to character roles, often in horror films from 1960 onward.  Her most celebrated of these was Georges Franju's genuinely disturbing Eyes Without a Face (1960), in which she played deranged Dr. Genessier's loyal, psychopathic assistant.  Other creepy efforts included Lisa and the Devil (1974), The Antichrist (1974), Suspiria (1977), Lycanthrope, Son of the Night (1979), Killer Nun (1979), Inferno (1980), and Fatal Frames (1996).