Lisa Gastoni


Lisa Gastoni is an Italian film actress. Gastoni was named "Best Italian Actress of the Year, 1966" as she received both the Nastro D'Argento Award and the Golden Globe Award from Italy's Foreign Press Association.

Biography

Daughter of an Italian father and an Irish mother, Gastoni and her family moved to England in 1948. She turned from her initial ambition of being an architect to modelling and acting.
She appeared in various B movies throughout the 1950s, as well as co-starring as Giulia in the Sapphire Films TV series The Four Just Men for ITV and an episode of Danger Man.
Gastoni returned to Italy in the 1960s, first appearing in sword-and-sandal and swashbuckler films, but eventually gaining the attention of respected directors. The turning point in her film career was her role in Grazie, zia by Salvatore Samperi. This would set the tone for the roles she would play for the next decade; bourgeois women who were seductive yet sexually frustrated, cruel and arrogant yet sad and sympathetic, manipulating the people around them to try and fill the emptiness in their own lives.
After 1979, she retired from acting to focus on painting and writing. In 2005 she returned to the screen with an appearance in the film Cuore Sacro.

Selected filmography