Rosalina Neri, singer known as the ‘Italian Monroe’ who had her own British television series – obituary
Rosalina Neri, who has died aged 96, was a glamorous Italian film actress, television personality and would-be opera singer with little visible talent except her physique, which was indeed very visible; known as the “Italian Monroe” or Marilina, she was once described as “a combination of Sabrina, the young Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe – but grown to nightmare proportions”.
Her voice, alas, did not match her vital statistics and in December 1959 she was booed off stage at the Adelphi Theatre in London after a performance of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore in which she not only sang out of tune but was also unable to deliver the florid brilliance of Adina’s arias. “Her tiny voice sounded like someone singing through a pea-shooter,” observed one of the kinder critics.
Undeterred, Rosalina Neri re-emerged two years later using the stage name Angela Baldi to play Mimi in Puccini’s La bohème in Ghent. Reverting to her real name, she received a standing ovation from a 9,000-strong audience for her recital of operatic arias at the International Eisteddfod at Llangollen in Wales in 1962.
Rosalina Neri’s resemblance to Marilyn Monroe opened countless doors, including to dinner with President Kennedy in Washington. She was, however, overpromoted by her British lover Jack Hylton, the band leader-turned-impresario who was 35 years her senior. He showered her with gifts including an open-top Alfa Romeo sports car, ￡50,000 of jewellery and lavish holidays at his villa in the south of France.
They had been introduced at a party by Diana Dors, the “British Monroe”, when Rosalina Neri was in London to film a coffee commercial. “It was love at first sight,” she insisted of her attraction to the millionaire who was also light entertainment adviser at Associated-Rediffusion, part of the new ITV network. Soon she was making guest appearances on his shows.
In 1959 Hylton inflicted on British audiences The Rosalina Neri Show, broadcast in a prime slot on Friday evenings, but it was axed after only nine episodes. The biggest problem was its presenter’s approximate grasp of the English language, which left both viewers and guests bewildered about what she was saying or singing. In October 1961 she even missed a flight from London to Milan after failing to understand an airport boarding announcement.
On one occasion she accompanied Hylton to New York, where she spotted the real Marilyn Monroe: “I saw her at the entrance to a nightclub; she was drunk, she could barely stand, she was dressed in black and she had a ladder on her stocking. And yet she was so pretty, poor star.”
Rosalina Neri and Hylton were at Cap d’Antibes in 1963 when he announced that he had been called to London. “And what are you doing?” he asked. “I’m going to visit my mother,” she replied. The next thing she recalled was a telephone call from Hylton’s secretary telling her that her lover had married the Australian model and beauty queen Beverley Prowse. “And I was left alone like a dog,” she added.
Rosalina Neri was born in Arcisate, in the Varese region of northern Italy, on November 12 1927, the daughter of a bricklayer. She was educated at the Sant’Ambrogio boarding school, near Milan. Her career began on stage as a dancer and showgirl. By the mid-1950s she was appearing on Italian television and film, including in I Pinguini Ci Guardano (Penguins Look at Us, 1956), a comedy in which the residents of a zoo comment on their human observers.
Her hair was naturally brunette but one day the television director Marcello Marchesi, who had invited her on his programme Invito al Sorriso, said he wanted a blonde look. “We went on air on Thursday evening. The next day everyone said I was identical to Marilyn Monroe,” she recalled. Eventually her decolletage led to her being banned from Italian television.
Hylton died in January 1965, shortly before Rosalina Neri gave birth to their daughter, Angela (known as Coco), having resumed their affair after his marriage. The following year she appeared in the British papers saying she was in London to discuss her first West End musical, though that seems not to have materialised. Thereafter she was neither seen nor heard of again here.
Her stage career continued in Italy, where she gave recitals at La Scala, Milan. In 1977 she appeared at the Piccola Scala theatre in Britten’s The Beggar’s Opera and five years later Peter Ustinov directed her in Stravinsky’s The Flood. She also worked with the Italian stage director Giorgio Strehler, cooking a turkey for him every Christmas Eve. In 1997 her earthenware pot cracked in the oven. “It seemed a bad omen,” she said. He died the next day.
At one time Rosalina Neri was working on a show about the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, a notable seductress who used a wooden leg after her right one had been amputated in 1915. “I’d like to make that prosthesis talk. Who knows what it would have to say,” she said.
She returned to the Milan stage in 2016 with a semi-autobiographical show entitled Je Me Fut: False Memories of a True Life, an assortment of true, distorted and downright false anecdotes told and sung in French, Italian, Milanese and English by an elegant and elderly homeless woman. Her only props were a red balloon and a toy Ferrari dragged along by a string, the real one having been sold many years ago.
Yet, like a good Lombard businesswoman, the real Rosalina Neri had many years ago bought a small Milanese apartment, in a street off Via Washington, where she often entertained friends from La Scala. She remained resolutely single. “My solitude is a wonderful thing,” she told La Repubblica. “Men made me suffer so much and it wasn’t worth it.”
Rosalina Neri, born November 12 1927, died June 5 2024
