Paola Pezzaglia

Biography

Milan, 13 September 1886: the city’s most talked-about coiffeur, Gerolamo Pezzaglia, celebrated the birth of his only daughter, Paola, while the footlights of her uncle Angelo’s stage flickered in the distance. By six she had slipped into that glow herself, bewitching audiences nightly; before long she had clocked more than 200 roles across Italy, Switzerland, Tunis and Egypt, a human comet trailing applause. In 1908 she married her leading man, Antonio Greco; a year later their son Ruggero arrived. Widowhood struck brutally in 1913 when Antonio died at twenty-eight, but Paola returned to the spotlight. In 1914 she became Sofia in Luigi Maggi’s Il fornaretto di Venezia, then, four years on, slipped into the boots of Biribì for the four-chapter serial Il mistero dei Montfleury—The Cursed Field, Nobody’s Children, Festival of Martyrs, Garden of Silence. The same whirlwind year, 1918, saw her trade those boots for the calico of Eliza’s guardian in Riccardo Tolentino’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and swish a parasol as Madama Girasole in Cesare Zocchi de Collani’s misadventures-of-Fortunello romp. She rounded out her screen work in 1921 as the scheming countess of Umberto Mucci’s The Fool’s Revenge. While a winter tour packed Florence’s theatres, pneumonia slipped behind the curtain; Paola Pezzaglia took her final bow there on 17 December 1925, thirty-nine candles snuffed, the stage left darker for her absence.