Fiammetta Baralla(1943-2013)

A large woman endowed with the gift of gab, with uncommon expressive qualities and with a comic talent second to none, thus can be defined Fiametta Baralla, an Italian actress who was mostly active during the 1970s and 1980s. The daughter of actor Orlando Baralla, Beatrice (known as Fiammetta in her Trastevere neighborhood) had been born in Rome. As an actress, she made herself known in the avant-garde theater before heeding the call of cinema and television between 1968 and 2013, the year she died of a stroke. Her unusual corpulence and cheeky humor owed her a few weird roles in oddities like 'When Women Lost Their Tails' (where she plays an "intellectual" cave woman !) , cheesy comedies such as 'Il sergente Rompaglioni diventa... caporale!' (in which she is a... stout female sergeant) or (farcical) sexy romps alongside the more comely Edwige Fenech, Dagmar Lassander or Femi Benussi. It is exactly for the same reasons that she was hired by major filmmakers like Nino Manfredi (the nun in 'Between Miracles'), Ettore Scola (Maria in 'We All Loved Each Other So Much'), Marco Ferreri ('The Story of Piera') and, it goes without saying, the maestro - Federico Fellini himself (Ollio in 'The City of Women'). Less and less present on the screens - big or small - in the years 2000, she was happy to be chosen by Paolo Sorrentino to play Sabrina Ferrilli's mother in 'La Grande Bellezza'. Unfortunately, not only was it to be her last role before her death but her scenes were cut into the bargain. A sad ending for the "big funny lady "of Trastevere.