Lisa Gastoni (born 28 July 1935) is an Italian film actress. Gastoni was named "Best Italian Actress of the Year, 1966" as she received both the Nastro D'Argento Award and the Golden Globe Award from Italy's Foreign Press Association.[1]
Daughter of an Italian father and an Irish mother, Gastoni and her family moved to England in 1948. She turned from her initial ambition of being an architect to modelling and acting.[2]
She appeared in various B movies throughout the 1950s, as well as co-starring as Giulia in the Sapphire Films TV series The Four Just Men (1959) for ITV and at least two episodes of Danger Man in 1960 and 1961.
Gastoni returned to Italy in the 1960s, first appearing in sword-and-sandal and swashbuckler films, but eventually gaining the attention of respected directors. The turning point in her film career was her role in Grazie, zia by Salvatore Samperi. This would set the tone for the roles she would play for the next decade; bourgeois women who were seductive yet sexually frustrated, cruel and arrogant yet sad and sympathetic, manipulating the people around them to try to fill the emptiness in their own lives.[citation needed]
In 1979, she retired from acting to focus on painting and writing. In 2005 she returned to the screen with an appearance in the film Cuore Sacro.
^Aaker, Everett (2011). Encyclopedia of Early Television Crime Fighters: All Regular Cast Members in American Crime and Mystery Series, 1948-1959. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. pp. 230–231. ISBN978-0-7864-6409-8.
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