Actresses: La Lisi

By now, everyone knows that the tousled blonde with the lynx eyes who emerged slowly and nearly nude from the pasteboard cake at the bachelor party in How to Murder Your Wife is that 27-year-old Italian import, Virna Lisi. Her co-star Jack Lemmon has said: “She’s a star. She has it, a real regality”; critics have agreed, and the public is purring contentedly. About the only people not in on the secret are her fellow Romans, who are only now getting to see the film in Italy.

And it is not really the Italians’ fault. First of all, La Lisi was a cold brunette when she left their shores. And even after 25 European films, she was best known to them as “La Bocca della Veritd” (The Mouth of Truth), not for her Cassandra-like utterances, but for her TV toothpaste commercials. None of this influenced How to Murder’s author, George Axelrod, who wanted some Continental dish for the part and took one look at Virna in a “screen test, a bedroom scene with Lemmon, and cancelled any further auditions.

Virna arrived in Hollywood with just three pat English phrases (“Is necessary?” “Is possible?” and “Poor Virna!”). But she was ready. “This side is too perfect,” she told the cameramen about her right side, the one with the mole below the lip. “This one is more interesting,” she said, turning portside to. And who taught her that lesson? “I and me, and that’s enough.”

“I am a self-made personality,” she says. The product of a straight bourgeois background, she has propelled herself to the point where she is now the wife of a fashionable Roman architect and mother of a three-year-old boy (“An earthquake; he’s so handsome”), can afford to collect shoes (70 pairs) and furs (14, including six mink), drive a Maserati and learn to fly. Best of all, having been discovered abroad, she finds herself big box office at home.

Since How to Murder, La Lisi has landed three comedy roles, and returns to Hollywood this fall to co-star in Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees. At the moment in Rome, she is shooting A Virgin for the Prince in a role that involves considerable bed play with Vittorio Gassman. But Virna has decided this is no time to turn coy. “I don’t mind being nude under a couple of sheets,” she says. “For the moment, I’m only a body, and I don’t want to be an actress with psychological problems.”