Trivia of Pier Angeli

Trivia of Pier Angeli (19 June 1932 - 10 September 1971)

*Angeli was born Anna Maria Pierangeli in 1932, in Sardinia, an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea. Her father was a construction worker and her mother an amateur actress. Along with that of her twin sister Maria, Angeli’s talent was cultivated by her mother to make sure the two girls were able to make a living from the silver screen.

*Angeli made her film debut with Vittorio De Sica's Italian film, Domani è troppo tardi (1950) after being spotted by director Léonide Moguy and De Sica while studying arts in Rome, at the age of 16. Her work was so impressive that she won an Italian award for Best Actress, and caught the eye of MGM producers, who offered her a contract with the studio.MGM launched her in Teresa (1951), her first Hollywood film.Reviews for this performance compared her to Greta Garbo, she won the New Star of the Year–Actress Golden Globe.

*In Hollywood, Pier Angeli became good friends with Debbie Reynolds (her lifelong time bestfriend), Louis Jourdan, and Richard Attenborough.

*In the early 1950's, Pier once engaged to Kirk Douglas.She also dated James Dean while he was filming East of Eden (1955).Reportedly, Pier and James Dean were very much in love and wanted to marry, but her mother was against the union because of Dean's behavior and because he wasn't Catholic, and helped arrange Pier's marriage to Vic Damone. Three years before she died, the National Enquirer magazine published an interview in which Pier would have said that Dean was the only man she had ever really loved.

*Married twice times.Her first husband was singer Vic Damone that she met on the movie set Hit The Deck (1951).And her last husband was famous composer Armando Trovajoli who 14 years older than her.

*Made two movies with Paul Newman: The Silver Chalice (1954) and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956).Newman would later say of her: "The most beautiful Italian actress of the century. She was an extremely complex and gifted woman. It was so unfortunate that the roles she was asked to play rarely demanded what I know she had to offer."

*On 10 September 1971, at the age of 39, Angeli was found dead of a barbiturate overdose at her home in Beverly Hills.In a 1989 television interview with Skip E. Lowe, actor John Ericson and his wife, actress Karen Ericson, claimed that Pier Angeli did not commit suicide. They said that her twin sister, actress Marisa Pavan, told them Pier had gotten sick. A doctor came to the house and gave her medication that she had a negative reaction to; her tongue swelled and she choked to death. The reaction, however, was delayed, so she died after the doctor had left her house. The rumors quickly spread that she had taken her own life.