Lorella De Luca

Lorella De Luca
Lorella De Luca in the film Il bidone
Born	(1940-09-17)17 September 1940 Florence, Tuscany, Italy
Died	9 January 2014(2014-01-09) (aged 73) Civitavecchia, Rome, Italy
Other names	Hally Hammond
Occupation	Actress Assistant director
Years active	1955–1984
Spouse(s)	Duccio Tessari (m. 1971–94)
Children	Federica Tessari Fiorenza Tessari

Lorella De Luca (17 September 1940 – 9 January 2014) was an Italian film, television, and voice actress. One of the most recognized of Italian cinema during the mid-to-late 1950s, she is best known for having played naive young girls in dramas and comedies.

She was born in Florence, Italy and, following her "discovery" at age 14, made her acting debut in the Federico Fellini film Il bidone (1955). De Luca's breakout role, however, came a year later following her performance in Dino Risi's comedy Poor, But Beautiful (1956) and continued on in the genre, with appearances in Mario Monicelli films A Tailor's Maid (1957) and Doctor and the Healer (1957), as well as in Duccio Tessari's Spaghetti Westerns A Pistol for Ringo (1965) and its sequel The Return of Ringo (1965) with Giuliano Gemma.

Lorella De Luca was born in Florence, Italy on 17 September 1940. "Discovered" at the age of fourteen by a director who followed De Luca home, and convinced her father that she should be in films, she made her feature film debut in Federico Fellini's Il bidone (1955) as Patrizia, the young daughter of middle-aged con man Augusto (Broderick Crawford). She subsequently attended the prestigious "Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia" (Experimental Cinematography Centre) in Rome, and the following year appeared in what would be her breakout role in Dino Risi's Poor, But Beautiful (1956) alongside other young actors Marisa Allasio, Renato Salvatori and Maurizio Arena. The success of the film made De Luca one of the most popular of Italian cinema; her freshness and grace endeared her to the public.