Italian actress Monica Vitti, ___ icon best known for her starring roles in films by Michelangelo Antonioni, has died aged 90, the country’s culture ministry said on Wednesday.

“Goodbye Monica Vitti, goodbye queen of Italian cinema. Today is a truly sad day, we have lost a great artist and a great Italian,” the culture minister, Dario Franceschini, said in a statement.

Vitti shot to international fame with the 1960 drama L’Avventura (The Adventure) in which she plays a tormented woman who dallies with the lover of her missing friend.

Born in Rome on 3 November 1931, Vitti – whose real name was Maria Luisa Ceciarelli – discovered a passion for the theatre during the second world war, when she entertained her family with puppets to relieve boredom. 

“As the bombs fell, when we had to take refuge in the shelters, my little brother and I would improvise little plays to entertain those around us,” she recounted years later.

(Adapted from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/feb/02/monica-vitti-queen-of-italian-cinema-dies-aged-90)