Franca Bettoia is an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 actress.

Born in Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

, she made her first film appearance in Un palco all'opera (1955, by Siro Marcellini). The following year she appeared in Los amantes del desierto ("Desert Warrior", a Spanish-Italian desert epic starring Ricardo Montalban

Ricardo Montalbán

Ricardo Gonzalo Pedro Montalbán y Merino, KSG was a Mexican radio, television, theatre and film actor. He had a career spanning six decades and many notable roles...

, Carmen Sevilla

Carmen Sevilla

Carmen Sevilla is a popular Spanish actress, singer and TV presenter. She made her film debut in 1948 in Jalisco Canta en Sevilla. Other roles include Academy Award nominee La venganza, Buscando a Mónica and the 1956 French film Don Juan.She played Mary Magdalene in Nicholas Ray's King of Kings...

 and Gino Cervi

Gino Cervi

Gino Cervi was an Italian actor of international fame.Cervi was born in Bologna. His father was the theatre critic Antonio Cervi.In 1928, he married Nini Gordini and they had a son, Tonino Cervi...

. She next appeared opposite Pietro Germi

Pietro Germi

Pietro Germi was an Italian actor, screenwriter, and director. Germi was born in Genoa, Liguria, to a lower-middle class family. He was a messenger and briefly attended nautical school before deciding on a career in acting.He studied acting and directing at Rome's Centro Sperimentale di...

 in L'uomo di paglia  (1958), and opposite Macha Méril and Jacques Charrier in the French production La main chaude (1960, by Gérard Oury). She appeared as a nun in Apocalisse sul Fiume Giallo (The Dam on the Yellow River, 1960), an anti-Communist propaganda film

Propaganda film

The term propaganda can be defined as the ability to produce and spread fertile messages that, once sown, will germinate in large human cultures.” However, in the 20th century, a “new” propaganda emerged, which revolved around political organizations and their need to communicate messages that...

 which portrays the victory of Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...

's People's Liberation Army

People's Liberation Army

The People's Liberation Army is the unified military organization of all land, sea, strategic missile and air forces of the People's Republic of China. The PLA was established on August 1, 1927 — celebrated annually as "PLA Day" — as the military arm of the Communist Party of China...

 as seen through the eyes of an American journalist (Georges Marchal) reporting from the side of the nationalists. In 1961, she starred opposite Alan Ladd

Alan Ladd

-Early life:Ladd was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He was the only child of Ina Raleigh Ladd and Alan Ladd, Sr. He was of English ancestry. His father died when he was four, and his mother relocated to Oklahoma City where she married Jim Beavers, a housepainter...

 in Orazi e Curiazi

Duel of Champions

Orazi e Curiazi is a 1961 film about the Roman legend of the Horatii, triplet brothers from Rome who fought a duel against the Curiatii, triplet brothers from Alba Longa in order to determine the outcome of a war between their two nations.This film was directed by Ferdinando Baldi and Terence Young...

 (Duel of the Champions), a sword and sandals adventure set in ancient Rome.

In 1964, Bettoia co-starred with Vincent Price

Vincent Price

Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. was an American actor, well known for his distinctive voice and serio-comic attitude in a series of horror films made in the latter part of his career.-Early life and career:Price was born in St...

 in the horror/science fiction film The Last Man on Earth (1964, by Ubaldo Ragone and Sidney Salkow

Sidney Salkow

Sidney Salkow was an American film director , screen writer, and television director....

), the first screen adaptation of Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson

Richard Burton Matheson is an American author and screenwriter, primarily in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres. He is perhaps best known as the author of What Dreams May Come, Bid Time Return, A Stir of Echoes, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and I Am Legend, all of which have been...

's novel I Am Legend. She then played a princess in the adventure films Sandokan alla riscossa  (1964) and Sandokan contro il leopardo di Sarawak (1964). In 1967 she appeared as Ugo Tognazzi

Ugo Tognazzi

Ugo Tognazzi was an Italian film, TV, and theatre actor, director, and screenwriter.-Early life:Tognazzi was born in Cremona, in northern Italy but spent his youth in various localities as his father was a traveller clerk for an insurance company.After his return in the native city in 1936, he...

’s lover in the comedy Il fischio al naso (The Seventh Floor, 1967). Bettoia and Tognazzi married in 1972. They had a had a daughter, film director Maria Sole Tognazzi

Maria Sole Tognazzi

Maria Sole Tognazzi is an Italian film director.-Biography:She is the daughter of actor and director Ugo Tognazzi and actress Franca Bettoia...

.

Bettoia acted in only three more films after Il fischio al naso. In the comedy Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare l'amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa? (1968, by Ettore Scola) she starred alongside Alberto Sordi

Alberto Sordi

Alberto Sordi, also known as Albertone, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian actor. He was also a film director and the dubbing voice of Oliver Hardy in the Italian version of the Laurel & Hardy films....

 and Bernard Blier

Bernard Blier

Bernard Blier was a French character actor. His rotund features and premature baldness allowed him to often play cuckolded husbands in his early career. He proved to be one of France's most versatile and sought-after character actors, performing interchangeably in comedies and dramas...

. In Touche pas à la femme blanche (Don’t Touch the White Woman, directed by Marco Ferreri in 1974) she starred alongside Catherine Deneuve, Marcello Mastroianni and Michel Piccoli. Her last film, Teste rasate (1993) is a drama about skinhead

Skinhead

A skinhead is a member of a subculture that originated among working class youths in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, and then spread to other parts of the world. Named for their close-cropped or shaven heads, the first skinheads were greatly influenced by West Indian rude boys and British mods,...

s, in which her son, Gianmarco Tognazzi, plays the lead role.

External links

• Page at IMDB