Background
Pier Angeli was born on June 19, 1933 in Sardinia. She was a daughter of Ernica Pierangeli.
Pier Angeli was born on June 19, 1933 in Sardinia. She was a daughter of Ernica Pierangeli.
The twin sister of Marisa Pavan, she was discovered as a teenager by Léonide Moguy and starred in Domani E Troppo Tardi (49, Moguy) and Domani E un Altro Giorno (50, Moguy). “Utterly charming and f ragile,” she was hired by Fred Zinnemann for Teresa (50), and that led to an MGM contract.
In America, she also made The Light Touch (51, Richard Brooks); The Devil Makes Three (52, Andrew Marion); The Story of Three Loves (53, Gottfried Reinhardt), in which she is a suicidal girl rescued by Kirk Douglas; Sombrero (53, Norman Foster); The Flame and the Flesh (54, Brooks); The Silver Chalice (54, Victor Saville); pretty good as the wife to Rocky Graziano in Somebody LJp There Likes Me (56, Robert Wise); Port Afrique (56, Rudolph Maté); to France for The Vintage (57, Jeffrey Hayden); with Danny Kaye in Merry Andrew (58, Michael Kidd).
That’s when she went back to Europe, and to more halting work: S O S. Pacific (60, Guy Green); the unlikely wife in The Angrt/ Silence (60, Green); Sodom and Gomorrah (61, Robert Aldrich): White Slave Ship (62, Silvio Amadio), with Edmund Purdom; Shadow of Evil (64, André Hunebelle); Spy in Your Eye (65, Vittorio Sala); Battle of the Bulge (65, Ken Annaldn); One Step to Hell (68, Sandy Howard); Even/ Bastard a Ling (70, Uri Zohar), made in Israel; Octaman (71. Harry Essex).
She was a beloved of James Dean, but her family disapproved of him. So she married the singer Vic Damone in 1954, but that only lasted a few years. She returned to Europe in the 1960s and was declared a suicide when she was not yet forty', the victim of a drug overdose.