Paola Mori

Paola Mori
Paola Mori and Orson Welles (May 1955)
Born	Paola di Girifalco, Contessa di Girifalco (1928-09-18)18 September 1928 Italy
Died	12 August 1986(1986-08-12) (aged 57) Las Vegas, Nevada
Cause of death	Injuries sustained from a car accident
Nationality	Italian
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1953–1962
Spouse(s)	Orson Welles (married 1955–1985)
Children	Beatrice Welles

Paola di Girifalco, Contessa di Girifalco (18 September 1928 – 12 August 1986), better known by her professional name Paola Mori, was an Italian actress and aristocrat, and the third and last wife of Orson Welles.

Paola Mori was born in 1928 to an Italian aristocratic family. By 1953, she had begun carving out a career for herself as a film actress, playing supporting roles in several Italian films.

In 1953 Mori met Orson Welles, and he cast her as the female lead of his film Mr. Arkadin (1955). The couple embarked on a passionate affair, and they were married at her parents' insistence. They were wed in London May 8, 1955, and their daughter Beatrice Welles was born in New York on 13 November 1955.

After the release of Mr. Arkadin, Mori was stung by the wave of negative reviews of her performance (in which her voice had been dubbed by Billie Whitelaw, to conceal her Italian accent), and once she was married to Welles, she acted in only a handful of her husband's projects, and then withdrew from acting altogether. Gary Graver, Welles's cameraman for the last 15 years of his life, wrote in a book co-authored with film historian Andrew J. Rausch that "the couple was estranged from the mid-1960s through [to] Welles's death in 1985." His description is at odds with accounts given not only by Beatrice Welles, who says her mother provided a loving, stable home life for the filmmaker for much of their 30-year marriage, and Welles' close friend, filmmaker Juan Cobos and Chimes at Midnight co-star Keith Baxter.

Although British tabloids reported Welles's affair with Oja Kodar as early as 1969 (which was a factor in his moving permanently to the United States in 1970), both Mori and her daughter remained oblivious to Kodar's existence until 1984. In the 1970s, Welles set up a home with his wife and daughter in the United States, first in Sedona, Arizona, then in Las Vegas, Nevada, ostensibly because the climate would be good for his asthma. In the early 1980s, Welles divided his time between his Las Vegas home with Mori and their daughter, and a Los Angeles home with Kodar, and the two women never met during his lifetime. When Mori found out about Kodar in 1984, she threw Welles out of their Nevada house, and neither Mori nor Beatrice Welles saw him for much of the last year of his life, although they still talked regularly on the telephone. Beatrice stated: "They sort of separated toward the end because he had a girlfriend. My mother found out about it, and he denied it. She told him he could come back home as soon as he stopped lying to her. He didn't come home during that last year of his life, but he and my mother talked on the phone every day."