Gina Lollobrigida, once dubbed “the most beautiful woman in the world” after the title of one of her movies, is getting married to a man 34 years her junior.
“We wanted for this to happen sooner, but it just wasn’t possible,” Lollobrigida, 79, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Thursday, without elaborating.
Lollobrigida said she met her husband to be, Javier Rigau y Rafols of Barcelona, Spain, at a party in Monte Carlo and the two have been dating for 22 years.
The diva, who in Italy is affectionately nicknamed “La Lollo,” told Spain’s Hola’ magazine, which first reported her wedding plans, that “I have always had a weakness for younger men because they are generous and have no complexes.”
The two will get married in New York before the end of the year, Lollobrigida told the AP in a telephone interview from her house in Rome.
It will be her second wedding. She was divorced in 1971 from Yugoslavian-born doctor Milko Skofic.
News of her wedding plans was featured prominently in Italian newspapers.
“They have gone mad here in Italy. I didn’t think I was going to set off such a bomb,” Lollobrigida said bashfully.
Lollobrigida embodied the prototype of Italian beauty and began making movies in Italy just after the end of World War II.
Highlights of her career include “The World’s Most Beautiful Woman” in 1955, Golden Globe-winner “Come September,” costarring Rock Hudson, “Trapeze,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Bread, Love and Dreams” and “Never So Few.”
The daughter of a furniture-maker in Subiaco, Italy, Lollobrigida was plucked from the streets of Rome by producer Mario Costa to appear in the movies after the war.
A voluptuous art student whose first love was painting and sculpture, she was brought to America by the eccentric mogul Howard Hughes. She has played opposite some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Humphrey Bogart, Yul Brynner, Frank Sinatra, Sean Connery, Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis.
In Italy, she worked with the likes of Vittorio De Sica and Luigi Comencini.
In recent years, she has returned to art, first with photography and then with sculpture.