Caterina Boratto
Italian postcard. Rizzoli & C., Milano, 1940. Photo by Luxardo.
Caterina Boratto (1915-2010) was an Italian film actress, who appeared in 50 films between 1936 and 1993.
Born in Turin, Boratto studied at the Musical Lyceum in her hometown with the purpose of becoming a singer; noted by Guido Brignone, she made her debut in Vivere/ To Live, alongside Tito Schipa, who fell in love with her. Thanks to the film's success, she immediately became a star in the telefoni bianchi genre, e.g. in Gennaro Righelli's comedy Hanno rapito un uomo/ They've Kidnapped a Man (1938), in which she played a Russian grand duchess opposite Vittorio De Sica as a film actor. She also got the offer of a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She moved to Hollywood to become a second Jeanette MacDonald, but tired of waiting to start the first film she returned to Italy just when World War II broke out. During the war, she fell in love with a war hero, count Guidi di Romena, who was killed in an air fight, against the background of Turin being bombed.
Boratto returned to film making in Rome: first the melodrama Il romanzo di un giovane povero (Brignone, 1942) with the heartthrob of those years: Amedeo Nazzari, followed by the Shakespeare adaptation Dente per dente/Measure for Measure (Marco Elter, 1943). Next she played in the tragicomedy Campo de' fiori/The Peddler and the Lady (Mario Bonnard, 1943). The film deals with a fishmonger Peppino (Aldo Fabrizi), who pretends to be a womanizer, mocked by greengrocer Elide (Anna Magnani), who yet loves him. He instead is smitten with a young elegant lady, Elsa (Boratto), who deposits her lively little son with him. She proves to be a married woman who eventually returns to her husband, with her son, leaving Peppino only with a lesson about life. So he marries the honest, working class Elide. While Boratto often played austere, classy ladies, she was much less so in real life.
In 1943 Boratto lost two brothers, the partisan Renato and the soldier Filiberto, killed in the massacre of the Acqui Division in Cefalonia. In 1944, she married a doctor, Armando Ceratto, owner of a clinic and connected to the Resistance, with whom she had two children: Marina and Paolo. Except for one film in 1951, she basically retired from show business for twenty years before accepting to play two key roles in Otto e mezzo/ 8½ (1963) and Giulietta degli spiriti/ Juliet of the Spirits (1965) by Federico Fellini, who had been one of the scriptwriters of Campo de' fiori. In 8 1/2 she is an elegant lady at the spa, while in Juliet of the Spirits she is Giulietta's proud, vain mother, who is only interested in Giulietta for bettering her looks.
Starting from the second half of the 1960s, Boratto reprised appearing in films with some regularity, as in Io, io, io... e gli altri/Me, Me, Me... and the Others (1965) by Alessandro Blasetti with Franca Valeri, Ardenne '44, un inferno/Castle Keep (1969) by Sydney Pollack, and Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma/Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) by Pier Paolo Pasolini. From the late 1970s Boratto also became very active on television, being cast in dozens of TV series such as Anna Karenina (1974), Un amore di Dostoevskij (1978), Morte a passo di valzer (179), Bel Ami (1979), and Villa Arzilla (1990-1991). Caterina Boratto died in Rome in 2010 at the high age of 95 years.
Sources: Italian and English Wikipedia, IMDB.
Caterina Boratto
Italian postcard. Rizzoli & C., Milano, 1940. Photo by Luxardo.
Caterina Boratto (1915-2010) was an Italian film actress, who appeared in 50 films between 1936 and 1993.
Born in Turin, Boratto studied at the Musical Lyceum in her hometown with the purpose of becoming a singer; noted by Guido Brignone, she made her debut in Vivere/ To Live, alongside Tito Schipa, who fell in love with her. Thanks to the film's success, she immediately became a star in the telefoni bianchi genre, e.g. in Gennaro Righelli's comedy Hanno rapito un uomo/ They've Kidnapped a Man (1938), in which she played a Russian grand duchess opposite Vittorio De Sica as a film actor. She also got the offer of a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She moved to Hollywood to become a second Jeanette MacDonald, but tired of waiting to start the first film she returned to Italy just when World War II broke out. During the war, she fell in love with a war hero, count Guidi di Romena, who was killed in an air fight, against the background of Turin being bombed.
Boratto returned to film making in Rome: first the melodrama Il romanzo di un giovane povero (Brignone, 1942) with the heartthrob of those years: Amedeo Nazzari, followed by the Shakespeare adaptation Dente per dente/Measure for Measure (Marco Elter, 1943). Next she played in the tragicomedy Campo de' fiori/The Peddler and the Lady (Mario Bonnard, 1943). The film deals with a fishmonger Peppino (Aldo Fabrizi), who pretends to be a womanizer, mocked by greengrocer Elide (Anna Magnani), who yet loves him. He instead is smitten with a young elegant lady, Elsa (Boratto), who deposits her lively little son with him. She proves to be a married woman who eventually returns to her husband, with her son, leaving Peppino only with a lesson about life. So he marries the honest, working class Elide. While Boratto often played austere, classy ladies, she was much less so in real life.
In 1943 Boratto lost two brothers, the partisan Renato and the soldier Filiberto, killed in the massacre of the Acqui Division in Cefalonia. In 1944, she married a doctor, Armando Ceratto, owner of a clinic and connected to the Resistance, with whom she had two children: Marina and Paolo. Except for one film in 1951, she basically retired from show business for twenty years before accepting to play two key roles in Otto e mezzo/ 8½ (1963) and Giulietta degli spiriti/ Juliet of the Spirits (1965) by Federico Fellini, who had been one of the scriptwriters of Campo de' fiori. In 8 1/2 she is an elegant lady at the spa, while in Juliet of the Spirits she is Giulietta's proud, vain mother, who is only interested in Giulietta for bettering her looks.
Starting from the second half of the 1960s, Boratto reprised appearing in films with some regularity, as in Io, io, io... e gli altri/Me, Me, Me... and the Others (1965) by Alessandro Blasetti with Franca Valeri, Ardenne '44, un inferno/Castle Keep (1969) by Sydney Pollack, and Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma/Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) by Pier Paolo Pasolini. From the late 1970s Boratto also became very active on television, being cast in dozens of TV series such as Anna Karenina (1974), Un amore di Dostoevskij (1978), Morte a passo di valzer (179), Bel Ami (1979), and Villa Arzilla (1990-1991). Caterina Boratto died in Rome in 2010 at the high age of 95 years.
Sources: Italian and English Wikipedia, IMDB.