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Marisa Pavan, a leading lady of 1950s Hollywood who rose to prominence on the heels of her twin sister, the actress and singer Pier Angeli, and received an Oscar nomination for playing Anna Magnani’s sensitive young daughter in “The Rose Tattoo,” died Dec. 6 at her home in Gassin, a town on the French Riviera. She was 91.
Her family confirmed the death, according to her biographer, Margaux Soumoy, but did not give a specific cause.
Although she appeared in only nine American movies, all in a span of less than a decade, the Italian-born Ms. Pavan was widely praised for bringing glamour and sophistication to her performances as waifs, ingénues and regal young women, at times while appearing opposite some of the biggest names in mid-century cinema.
After making her debut in John Ford’s World War I film remake “What Price Glory” (1952), as the French love interest of an ill-fated Marine (Robert Wagner), Ms. Pavan appeared with Alan Ladd in the western “Drum Beat” (1954) and rose to stardom at 23 with “The Rose Tattoo” (1955), based on a Tony Award-winning play by Tennessee Williams.
The film, which starred Magnani as a volcanic grieving widow and Burt Lancaster as the truck driver who romances her, was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won three. Ms. Pavan, who played the daughter Rosa Delle Rose, a 15-year-old falling in love for the first time, lost in the best supporting actress category to her castmate Jo Van Fleet — honored for her performance in another film, “East of Eden” — but made it to the stage to accept the best actress prize on behalf of Magnani, who was in Italy the night of the ceremony.
“It was the most difficult film I ever made,” Ms. Pavan said in a 2001 interview, later published on the website Film Talk. Magnani, a fellow Italian, “didn’t speak a word of English,” she recalled, and learned her lines phonetically while battling with director Daniel Mann and cinematographer James Wong Howe, who won an Oscar for the film. (One bright spot: working with Williams, who would cook for the cast when they were shooting on location near his home in Key West, Fla. Ms. Pavan said the playwright taught her how “to listen, and how to make a good spaghetti sauce.”)
Ms. Pavan went on to star as Catherine de Medici in the costume drama “Diane” (1956), in which she vied with the title character (Lana Turner) for the love of Prince Henri (Roger Moore). She also played an Italian woman who had a wartime affair with a U.S. Army captain (Gregory Peck) in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1956), and was the love interest of an ex-cop (Tony Curtis) investigating a priest’s murder in “The Midnight Story (1957).
By then, she had a film resume to match that of her sister, who starred in Hollywood movies including “Teresa” (1951) and “Somebody Up There Likes Me” (1956), opposite Paul Newman, while also making headlines through her romance with James Dean and her four-year marriage to actor and crooner Vic Damone.
“Where Anna was lighthearted and spontaneous, Marisa was thoughtful and introspective,” Damone wrote in a memoir, “Singing Was the Easy Part.” “That came through in her acting as well, which tended to be quieter and more underplayed, though still moving.” (Angeli died at 39 in 1971, from a barbiturate overdose.)
Ms. Pavan appeared in only two more movies before turning to television and stage work, effectively abandoning her Hollywood career after the release of the biblical epic “Solomon and Sheba” (1959), starring Yul Brynner and Gina Lollobrigida.
The film’s original leading man, Tyrone Power, had died partway through the production, devastating Ms. Pavan. She was also frustrated by clashes with the filmmakers, whom she accused of abruptly cutting down her role as Abishag, a consort to King David, and of irreparably damaging her reputation after she threatened to walk out on the production.
Ms. Pavan said she was tired of being pushed around by filmmakers and studio executives, although she would later work on American television, guest-starring on shows including “Wonder Woman” and “Hawaii Five-O.”
“When I arrived in Hollywood, I was a little bit of a rebel because I believed that what I had to offer, they had to take, without changing my hair or my nose,” she recalled in the Film Talk interview. “It was not in my nature to compromise. They did change my sister; they made her up like a pinup girl. I could wear a wig to play a certain part, but they could not change me in life.”
Maria Luisa Pierangeli was born in Cagliari, on the Italian island of Sardinia, on June 19, 1932. Her mother was a homemaker, and her father was an architect whose work took the family to Rome. Ms. Pavan said that during the city’s Nazi occupation in World War II, they sheltered a Jewish general in the Italian military, and that she later adopted his surname as her stage name.
Her twin sister got into show-business first, as a teenager. Born Anna Maria Pierangeli, she was reportedly discovered by the actor and filmmaker Vittorio De Sica while walking down Via Veneto in 1948.
Ms. Pavan’s father died two years later. Soon after, in early 1951, the family came to Hollywood — the twins were joined by their much younger sister, Patrizia, who also became an actress — where Ms. Pavan learned English through classes at UCLA. She started acting with encouragement from Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, who became her agent and later produced many of the James Bond films.
In 1956, she married Jean-Pierre Aumont, a dashing French film star who had previously married Dominican actress Maria Montez, dated Grace Kelly and been engaged to Hedy Lamarr. Ms. Pavan and Aumont appeared together in the Revolutionary War film “John Paul Jones” (1959) and later performed onstage, singing at New York supper clubs and dancing in a touring production of the musical “Gigi.”
The couple quietly divorced seven years into their marriage. But in a twist out of “The Parent Trap,” they were reportedly persuaded to move back in together by their two young sons, who “begged them to return to the same household,” according to the news agency United Press International.
The couple remarried in 1969 — Aumont later claimed that “the children didn’t know that their parents were divorced in the first place” — and remained together in France until Aumont’s death in 2001.
Survivors include her sons, Jean-Claude and Patrick Aumont; her sister Patrizia; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Ms. Pavan appeared in French filmmaker Jacques Demy’s “A Slightly Pregnant Man” (1973), starring Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni, and played the wife of Kirk Douglas in “Arthur Hailey’s the Moneychangers” (1976), an American miniseries. But her most rewarding role remained one of her first: Catherine de Medici, in “Diane.”
The filmmakers had been skeptical that she could pull off the tough-minded part after previously playing characters who were sweet and innocent, according to Ms. Pavan. “What was important to me was the struggle to get the part,” she said. “When you get a part, and finally you are recognized, it is the most joyful moment you can have as an actress.”