American actress Nadia Cassini, who found fame as a sex symbol in the Italian genre scene of the 1970s and 80s, has died in Italy at the age of 76.
The actress and showgirl’s only daughter Kassandra Voyagis confirmed her mother’s death after a long illness on March 18 in the southern Italian city of Reggio Calabria in a social media post.
Cassini was born Gianna Lou Müller on January 2, 1949, in Woodstock, New York, where her dancer and actor parents were on tour with a show.
She took her name from her first husband, the journalist Igor Cassini, whom she followed to Italy after he moved there for a time to oversee the fashion house of his designer brother Oleg Cassini. They divorced in 1972, and Cassini moved on with Greek actor Yorgo Voyagis, father of Kassandra.
In between times, Cassini had secured small roles in Romolo Guerrieri’s Il Divorzio and Piero Vivarelli’s The Snake God.
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After a brief return to the U.S., where she had a small role in Mike Hodge’s Pulp opposite Michael Caine, and taking time out for the birth of her daughter, Cassini returned to Italy, where her career took off as a sex symbol in a slew of Italian genre movies across the late 1970s and early 1980s
Her credits in this period included 1978 space opera Starcrash, an early production of Patrick Wachsberger alongside his father, as well as a string of so-called Italian Commedia Sexy films including Io zombo, tu zombi, lei zomba, The Nurse In The Military Madhouse and Adorable Infidels, which propelled her to fame in Italy.
After the genre started to die out, Cassini reinvented herself as a showgirl in 1980s variety shows of the then emerging channels of Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset TV network such as Drive In and Premiatissima.
Cassini retired from the entertainment world in the late 1980s.
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