Pier Angeli: A Fragile Life
by Jane Allen
Category: Performing Arts

“In Pier Angeli, a nineteen-year-old Italian girl, Hollywood has found an actress who eludes the town’s traditional classifications and whose unvarnished beauty and instinctive talent have already caused her to be called ‘Little Garbo’”—Theodore Strauss in Collier’s, April 1952. This work is the first full-length biography of actress Anna Maria Pierangeli, from her early life in Italy to her death at the age of 39. She was discovered by Vittorio De Sica and soon after starred in her first film, Domani è troppo tardi (Tomorrow Is Too Late), which began her meteoric rise to fame in Italy. She arrived in Hollywood in 1950 at the age of 18, and the first thing MGM did was change her name to Pier Angeli and predict great things for its newest actress. The book covers her seven year career with MGM, her two unhappy marriages to Vic Damone and Armando Trovajoli, her love for her children Perry and Andrew, her brief and stormy relationship with James Dean, her dependent relationships with her mother and such stars as Kirk Douglas, Richard Attenborough and Debbie Reynolds, and the mystery surrounding her death.