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 aspiring opera singer with little visible talent other than her physique, which was very visible indeed; known as the “Italian Monroe” or Marilina, she was once described as “a mixture of Sabrina, the young Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe – but it has reached nightmarish proportions.”

Unfortunately, her voice did not match her measurements and in December 1959, at London’s Adelphi Theatre, she was booed off the stage after a performance of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore in which she not only sang out of tune but was also unable to reproduce the flowery brilliance of Adina’s arias. “Her tiny voice sounded like someone singing through a pea-shooter,” noted one of the kinder critics.

Undeterred, Rosalina Neri reappeared two years later under the stage name Angela Baldi and played Mimi in Puccini’s La Bohème in Ghent. Under her real name, she received a standing ovation from an audience of 9,000 for her recital of opera arias at the International Eisteddfod in Llangollen, Wales in 1962.

Rosalina Neri’s resemblance to Marilyn Monroe opened many doors for her, including a dinner with President Kennedy in Washington. However, she was disproportionately promoted by her British lover Jack Hylton, the bandleader and later impresario who was 35 years her senior. He showered her with gifts, including an open-top Alfa Romeo sports car, jewelry worth £50,000 and luxurious holidays in his villa in the South of France.

They were introduced to each other at a party hosted 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 an entertainment consultant at Associated-Rediffusion, part of the new ITV network. She was soon making guest appearances on his shows.

In 1959, Hylton gave British audiences the Rosalina Neri Show, which aired on Friday nights in prime time, but was cancelled after just nine episodes. The biggest problem was the presenter’s imprecise command of English, which confused both viewers and guests about what she was saying or singing. In October 1961, she even missed a flight from London to Milan because she couldn’t understand an announcement at the airport.

Once she accompanied Hylton to New York, where she discovered the real Marilyn Monroe: “I saw her at the entrance to a nightclub; she was drunk, she could hardly stand, she was dressed in black and there was a ladder in her stocking. And yet she was so pretty, the poor star.”

Rosalina Neri and Hylton were at Cap d’Antibes in 1963 when he announced he had been called to London. “And what are you doing?” he asked. “I’m going to see my mother,” she replied. The next thing she remembered was a phone call from Hylton’s secretary, who told her that her lover had married Australian model and beauty queen Beverley Prowse. “And I was left alone like a dog,” she added.

Rosalina Neri was born on November 12, 1927, in Arcisate, in the Varese region of northern Italy, the daughter of a bricklayer. She attended the Sant’Ambrogio boarding school near Milan. Her career began on stage as a dancer and showgirl. In the mid-1950s, she appeared on Italian television and in films, including I Pinguini Ci Guardano (Penguins Are Watching Us, 1956), a comedy in which the inhabitants 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 to his program Invito al Sorriso, said he wanted to make her look blonde. “We went on air on Thursday night. The next day everyone said I looked just like Marilyn Monroe,” she recalls. Eventually her cleavage 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 British newspapers saying she was in London to discuss her first West End musical, but this does not seem to have happened and she has not been seen or heard from here since.

She continued her stage career in Italy, where she gave concerts at La Scala in Milan. In 1977 she appeared at the Piccola Scala theater 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 him a turkey every Christmas Eve. In 1997, her clay pot broke in the oven. “It seemed a bad omen,” she said. He died the next day.

Rosalina Neri once worked on a show about French actress Sarah Bernhardt, a well-known seductress who used a wooden leg after her right leg was amputated in 1915. “I would like to make this prosthesis talk. Who knows what it would have to say then,” she said.

In 2016, she returned to the Milan stage with a semi-autobiographical show called Je Me Fut: False Memories of a True Life, a collection of true, distorted and downright false anecdotes told and sung in French, Italian, Milanese and English by an elegant, elderly homeless woman. Her only props were a red balloon and a toy Ferrari towed behind her on a string. The real Ferrari was sold many years ago.

But as befits a good Lombard businesswoman, the real Rosalina Neri had bought a small Milanese apartment in a side street of Via Washington many years ago, where she often received friends from La Scala. She remained resolutely single. “My loneliness is a wonderful thing,” she told La Repubblica. “Men have caused me so much suffering and it wasn’t worth it.”

Rosalina Neri, born on November 12, 1927, died on June 5, 2024

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