In 1962, Federico Fellini placed advertisements in Italian newspapers seeking a woman to play the lead character’s mistress in his next film, which would eventually be titled 8½ and released the following year. The successful candidate, he wrote, should be “somewhat old-fashioned … with a pink-and-white complexion and a small pea-hen’s head on a Rubens body, very soft, flowery, maternal and opulent”.
The director auditioned as many as 5,000 applicants. “An interminable procession of ladies who had deserted their worried husbands and children came forward,” reported the writer Angelo Solmi in 1967. It was rumoured that the whole endeavour was merely a publicity stunt and that all along the role had been earmarked for Sandra Milo.
Milo, who has died aged 90, was a vivacious presence marketed as “the Italian Judy Holliday”. She and Fellini had met on a summer evening in the coastal town of Fregene; she happened to be passing a cafe where he was seated with his screenwriter, Ennio Flaiano, who knew Milo and called her over to introduce them.
Fellini was determined to coax Milo out of her unofficial retirement for the role in 8½ of Carla, mistress of the film-maker Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), who installs her in a nearby hotel while he is preparing his science-fiction epic.
When Fellini offered her the part, she reminded him she had quit the business, following savage reviews for her performance as an aristocrat’s daughter in Vanina Vanini (1961).
However the next morning, she was woken at home by the arrival of the director, his cinematographer and assorted technicians and make-up assistants, who had come to shoot a screen test. “They took me and put that famous little hat on my head,” she said, alluding to Carla’s fluffy white ushanka.
She was dressed in a black redingote festooned with violets; all at once, the lights were on her. “My God, what a thrill,” she recalled. “I felt like that was my world, and those were my people. I felt like I was flying.”
She signed the contract, agreeing to gain weight for the role. Shortly afterwards, she fell pregnant, though Fellini kept her chained to the trough all the same. “Every time Federico sees me off the set he tells me to go eat something,” she complained at the time. “I feel like a Strasbourg goose.”
When she finally emerged on set in costume at Cinecittà, Fellini and Mastroianni told her: “Welcome back. You’re home.”
To the ravishing dreamscape of 8½, which won two Oscars and is widely considered Fellini’s masterpiece, she brought an earthy vitality and rambunctiousness, as well as her unassailable beauty.
Fellini cast her again in his first colour film, Juliet of the Spirits (1965), this time in a tripartite role opposite his wife, Giulietta Masina, as the dissatisfied title character. Milo played Suzy, a hedonistic neighbour who hosts orgies, wears feather boas and plunging necklines, and cavorts in a treetop house where a slide connects her bed directly to a swimming pool. Milo is also seen as Iris, a spirit, and Fanny, a circus ingenue.
He sought to cast her a third time in the autobiographical Amarcord (1973), and even shot a screen test with her. But her husband, increasingly jealous of Fellini, forbade her from accepting. Milo’s declinature, the director said, left him with “an air of melancholy”. He told her: “I have something of a feeling we won’t see each other any more.”
In 1982, she published Caro Federico, a thinly veiled account of her time as the director’s lover. Fellini’s biographer John Baxter described it as “largely imagined”, and even Milo admitted eventually that it had been mostly a work of fiction. Fellini claimed never to have read the book. “I don’t even want to smell it,” he said.
Milo was born in Tunis, and moved with her family to Tuscany during her early childhood. At the age of 15, she wed Cesare Rodighiero, but the marriage was annulled after 21 days. She found early work as a model in Milan and began acting after moving to Rome, making her film debut in the comedy The Bachelor (1955).
Roberto Rossellini helped launch her career with General della Rovere (1959), which starred Vittorio de Sica as a Genoese con-man recruited by the Nazis, but Vanina Vanini was a notorious flop.
Fellini films apart, she gave her finest performance in Claude Sautet’s Classes Tous Risques (1960), in which she played an actor who becomes caught up with a gangster on the run. The film got lost in the shuffle at the time of its release, its elegant classicism upstaged by the more radical and irreverent Breathless, which had opened shortly before, though Sautet’s picture is recognised now as an exemplary policier.
Milo gave up acting for a second time in the early 1970s. Despite returning to the screen at the end of that decade, she was known latterly more for her appearances in gossip columns and on television as a presenter, talkshow guest or reality-show participant.
Reflecting on her time as Fellini’s muse, she confessed it had not always been easy. “Sometimes he’d make me feel indispensable, marvellous, as if I were the only woman he’d ever loved. And then he’d treat me like a nothing, a nobody.” She maintained that she loved him “truly, madly, deeply, stupidly”.
She is survived by three children: Debora, from her relationship with Moris Ergas, who produced films of hers including Generale della Rovere and La Visita (1963); Ciro and Azzurra, from her marriage to Ottavio De Lollis; and by a grandson. She was also briefly married to Jorge Ordoñez in 1990. All her marriages ended in divorce.
• Sandra Milo (Salvatrice Elena Greco), actor, born 11 March 1933; died 29 January 2024
