Remembering Gina Lollobrigida, the 'most beautiful woman in the world' who got an exclusive photoshoot with Fidel Castro

Gina Lollobrigida was born on July 4, 1927, in Subiaco, a picturesque hill town near Rome. Her father was a furniture maker. Lollobrigida spent her teenage years avoiding wartime bombing raids before studying sculpture at Rome's Academy of Fine Arts.

She began her career with beauty contests, posing for the covers of magazines and making brief appearances in small films. She was plucked off the streets of Rome by producer Mario Costa to appear on the big screen.

In 1947, she entered the Miss Italia beauty pageant and came third. Two years later, she got married to Slovenian doctor Milko Skofic.

Soon after the contest, the eccentric American mogul, Howard Hughes, brought Lollobrigida to the United States, where she performed with some of Hollywood's leading men in the 1950s and 60s. Her co-stars included Frank Sinatra, Sean Connery, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and Yul Brynner.

She also worked with Europe's most dashing stars like Louis Jourdan, Fernando Rey, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Alec Guinness.

Lollobrigida was best known for her performance in films like Luigi Comencini's 1953 classic Bread, Love and Dreams, and Jean Delannoy's 1956 The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

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While Lollobrigida played some dramatic roles, her most popular characters were in light-hearted comedies such as the Bread, Love trilogy.

She was dubbed as ‘the most beautiful woman in this world’ after the title of one of her films. With her lush eyelashes, and brown curls framing her face, Lollobrigida started a hairstyle rage in the 1950s known as the ‘poodle cut’.

Her first marriage to Milko Skofic ended in divorce in 1971 and in her middle age, her romance with a man 34 years her junior, Javier Rigau, from Barcelona, Spain, kept gossip pages buzzing for years.

Lollobrigida won seven David di Donatello awards, which is regarded as the Italian equivalent of the Oscars. However, by the 1970s she turned from acting to other creative pursuits such as photojournalism.

She donned a disguise to take award-winning photographs of her native Italy and her huge marble and bronze sculptures entered at an International Expo in Seville. She also shocked the world with a rare photoshoot and interview with Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

“We spent 12 days together,” she said. “He didn't interest me as a political leader but as a man. He realised that I hadn't gone there to attack him and he readily accepted me,” BBC reported.

In the last years of her life, Lollobrigida's name appeared in articles by journalists covering Rome's courts, as legal battles were waged over whether she had the mental competence to tend to her finances.

Gina Lollobrigida lived a famed life and few of her films are still regarded as classics. She was one of the greats and her story was as exotic as any of the roles she played.