Pier Angeli in Addio, Alexandra (1969)

Few people remember her today, but Pier Angeli had been a significant screen presence in the 1950s. She co-starred and hobnobbed with all of the A-Listers. After all, this is a woman who had a torrid affair with the legendary James Dean.

Vogue tells the story:

(Pier’s mother Enrica) had reservations about Dean, considering him untidy and ill-mannered. His atheism was another issue; Enrica was a devout Catholic. Despite Dean’s attempts to win her over, including by dressing up for visits and renting a tuxedo for Pierangeli’s movie premiere, Enrica remained unimpressed. Pierangeli and Dean continued to see each other in secret until November 1954, when just six months into their courtship, he asked her to marry him. She instinctively said yes. But two days later, after breaking the news to her mother, Pierangeli returned to Dean not only to renege her acceptance of his proposal, but also to announce that they must never see each other again. By the end of that month, she would surprise everyone by marrying the singer Vic Damone, an Italian-American and a Catholic. Needless to say, Dean was devastated.

Damone and Dean were not her only A-list connections. She was also engaged to Kirk Douglas at one time, and had once co-starred with no less a luminary than Paul Freakin’ Newman.

During her marriage to Vic Damone, they appeared as guests on the June 17, 1956 episode of What’s My Line:

By the end of the sixties, however, Hollywood had abandoned her. Near the end of her life, Pier tried to resuscitate her career by appearing in some low-rent projects to demonstrate that she was still working. This was one of those projects. There are reports that she wanted to keep this film out of distribution, and it’s easy to understand why she felt that way. This project had to do her career more harm than good. Her face looked older than her 37 years, her overacting in one sequence was embarrassing (scene 202 in the video link below), and Addio was a cheapjack piece of erotica which should theoretically have been far below her pay grade. Unfortunately, Addio Alexandra was not the low point of her career desperation. That would be Octaman.

By that time in her carer, she felt that she had run out of luck, with no more career opportunities, and no possibility of finding a new love. Despite the other relationships in her life, she never got over James Dean. In a letter to a good friend, written two months before her death, she wrote:

I don’t think any man can save me now. I think it may be too late. I think I was meant to live and die alone. Love is far away, somewhere deep inside of me. My love died at the wheel of a Porsche.

Did her despondency about the state of her life and career lead to suicide? There is a lot of debate about that. She did die of a drug overdose at 39. Was it an accidental overdose? Suicide? An error by her physician? We will never know for sure. We can’t conclude that she took her own life, but neither can we rule out the possibility, given her emotional state in those final years.

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Addio, Alexandra contains almost all of her career nudity. Pier Angeli was billed here under her real name, Anna Maria Pierangeli.

Videos here.

And here are Pier and Collette Descombes in publicity stills. The scene below is in the film, but these particular shots must have been posed on the set. Pier is the one with glasses!

The remainder of their careers:

Pier Angeli

… was topless in a 1970 film entitled In the Folds of the Flesh

Videos from In the Folds of the Flesh

For more info and a vast number of (non-nude) pictures, here is a very comprehensive web site dedicated exclusively to Pier Angeli.

Collette Descombes

… did an excellent full-body nude scene in La Ragazzina (1974)

… did a short topless scene in a 1969 film called Orgasmo.