Pier Paolo PasoliniObituaryLaura Betti
Italian actor and singer devoted to the memory of PasoliniThe Italian actor and cabaret performer Laura Betti, who has died aged 70, was the driving force behind the Pasolini Foundation, which she set up in Rome after the death of the poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975. The foundation has now found a home in Bologna, where both of them were born, and where Pasolini studied at university.
A barrister's daughter, Laura acted with several theatre companies, including that of Luchino Visconti, with his 1955 production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. She was a singer in the late 1950s, and among her first important cinema cameos was a role in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), as one of the authentic Roman personalities/ freaks in the beach villa orgy sequence. Exchanging insults with Marcello Mastroianni's journalist, was a role she would enjoy playing always.
In the early 1960s, Laura helped launch literary cabaret in Milan and Rome. In addition to her own droll songs, she performed sketches and lyrics by the likes of Alberto Moravia and Pasolini, whom she met in 1963. They hit it off immediately, and he became a regular guest at her home near the Spanish Steps.
The first Pasolini film in which Laura appeared was La Ricotta, his controversial 40-minute episode in RoGoPaG (1963). Thanks chiefly to Laura's foundation, it is now available as a minor classic in its own right, whereas the episodes by Jean-Luc Godard and the others are forgotten.
La Ricotta featured Orson Welles as an American director shooting a film about the passion of Christ in Rome. Laura was the temperamen tal star playing the Madonna, who was seen in the tableau vivant inspired by Pontormo's painting of the Deposition. Laura played herself - with a cross-section of Hollywood-on-the-Tiber café society - in the press party sequence under the crosses, when the sub-proletarian Roman extra playing one of the thieves died from indigestion.
Laura returned to the theatre in 1968, in a revival of Giordano Bruno's heretical Candlemaker, and then appeared, under Pasolini's direction in a Turin art gallery, in his verse drama Orgia. Even if his ideas on "theatre that is not theatre" were confused, the play was well in advance of its times. For the 10th anniversary of his death, Laura reprised the role of the woman in a tormented sado-masochistic relationship, and was more convincing under the direc tion of an experienced theatrical professional.
She appeared in two more Pasolini episodes of omnibus films. In The Earth Seen From The Moon (1967), with Toto, Silvana Mangano and Ninetto Davoli, she played the cameo of a tourist; in What Are The Clouds? (1968), an inspired comic puppet play, she was Desdemona.
In 1968, she had a more substantial Pasolini film role, as the maid in Theorem, for which she won the best actress award at the 1968 Venice festival. As the only peasant member of an otherwise bourgeois household, she alone finds redemption among those seduced by Terence Stamp's mysterious visitor, and at fade-out is seen flying from the rooftop while mother, father, son and daughter are left to rot.
In 1970, Laura performed Samuel Beckett's Not I for the Rome Municipal Theatre. Having done the translation of the playlet into Italian for the director Franco Enriquez, I was asked to help her memorise the monologue. It was a gruelling but rewarding experience, though I had to give up trying to convince her that Beckett did not want a realistic rendering of the words he had put into the "mouth". In the end, she gave an electrifying performance, even if it was not what the author had intended.
Her next Pasolini role was in his film The Canterbury Tales (1972), shot in England, in which she was the Wife of Bath. When Pasolini's chum Ninetto broke the director's heart by telling him he had decided to get married, Laura found herself obliged to play the role of a consolatory sister.
In the early 1970s, she appeared in films by Marco Bellocchio, Mauro Bolognini, Miklos Jancso and the Taviani Brothers. She was also in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango In Paris (1972), 1900 (1976) and La Luna (1979). She continued to be Pasolini's hostess and cook, while jealous of his relationship with Maria Callas.
Pasolini also convinced Laura to write a Rabelaisian novel about the sexual follies of 1960s swinging Rome, which she called, at his suggestion, Teta Veleta - only to find out later that the words were the name he had invented, at the age of three, to explain his first sexual fantasies, inspired by his mother's breasts and the knees of a boy his own age.
After Pasolini's murder, Laura led the defence of his memory. She probably realised that the truth of what happened may indeed have been as the boy Pelosi described it, but she preferred the idea of a rightwing conspiracy, or anyway of an improvised queer-bashing attack.
It has been suggested that Pasolini might have organised his own murder as a martyrdom, prompted by depression not only in his private life but also with the way Italian society was developing. But Laura refused to accept this: "He loved life too much," she maintained.
Indeed, she sacrificed her own career to protecting his memory, travelling throughout Italy, and around the world, for the cause. It is thanks to her aggressively passionate dedication that Pasolini's restored films and interviews have been made available for international viewing and his writings archived. In 2001, she made a 90-minute documentary, Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Reason For A Dream, emphasising what she considered to be his optimistic vision of the future. When health permitted, she continued to appear in films and on the stage.
In 1971, Pasolini wrote an affectionate obituary notice about her in Italian Vogue - imagining her death in 2001. It ended: "This is, in fact, the obituary notice of a heroine. It should be added that she was a witty person and an excellent cook."
· Laura Betti (Laura Trombetti), actor, born May 1 1934; died July 31 2004
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