Sample Page

Isa Miranda (born Ines Isabella Sampietro; 5 July 1905 – 8 July 1982) was an Italian actress with an international film career.^[1]

Miranda was born Ines Isabella Sampietro in Milan,^[1] the daughter of a street car conductor. When she was 10 years old, she began working as an errand girl for a dressmaker. She later had jobs in a box factory and a handbag factory. When she was 15, she became a model, a job that provided enough income for her to learn bookkeeping and typing in night school.^[2] She worked as a typist while attending the Accademia dei Filodrammatici in Milan and trained as a stage actress. She went on to play bit parts in Italian films in Rome. She changed her name to Isa Miranda and success came with Max Ophüls‘ film La Signora di tutti (Everybody’s Woman; 1934) in which she played Gaby Doriot, a famous film star and adventuress with whom men cannot help falling in love. This performance brought in its wake several film offers and a Hollywood contract with Paramount Pictures. There, billed as the “Italian Marlene Dietrich“, she played femme fatale roles in films such as Hotel Imperial (1939) and Adventure in Diamonds (1940).^[1]

She returned to Italy soon after the outbreak of World War II and continued to act on stage and to make films. In 1949, she starred in René Clément‘s The Walls of Malapaga, which won an Academy Award for the most outstanding foreign language film of 1950, and for Miranda, the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.^{[citation needed]} Another success of that period was La Ronde (1950), also directed by Ophüls.

Her career took her to France, Germany and Britain, where she frequently appeared in TV films, including The Avengers. Other notable film appearances included Siamo donne (1953), a portmanteau film, in which Miranda shared the screen with Anna Magnani, Alida Valli and Ingrid Bergman; Summertime (1955), starring Katharine Hepburn; Gli Sbandati (1955); The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964); The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968); and Liliana Cavani‘s The Night Porter (1974).^[1]

Miranda was married to the Italian director and producer Alfredo Guarini until his death in 1981. She died in Rome on 8 July 1982.^[1]

• Isa Miranda at IMDb
• Photographs and literature