Daria Nicolodi

Daria Nicolodi (19 June 1950 – 26 November 2020) was an Italian television and film actress and screenwriter, and associated mostly with the films of director Dario Argento.

Early life and career

Daria Nicolodi was born in Florence on 19 June 1950. Her father was a Florentine lawyer and her mother, Fulvia, was a scholar of ancient languages. Her maternal grandfather was composer Alfredo Casella. She moved to Rome in the late 1960s.

In 1970, she participated in the television variety show Babau which was shelved and only broadcast by RAI six years later. She made her screen debut the same year in Francesco Rosi's Many Wars Ago. In 1973, she starred in Elio Petri's Property Is No Longer a Theft. She also appeared in TV productions, such as the miniseries Nicotera, Without a Trace with Rossano Brazzi (1972), Portrait of a Veiled Woman with Nino Castelnuovo (1975), the drama Saturnino Farandola with Mariano Rigillo (1978), and Rosaura at 10 (1981).

Nicolodi starred in five films directed by Dario Argento between 1975 and 1987: Deep Red (1975), Inferno (1980), Tenebrae (1982), Phenomena (1985) and Opera (1987). She later stressed that the screenplays for Argento's Suspiria and Inferno owed many ideas to her authorship, but received writing credit only for the former. During this time, she also appeared in Shock, the final film of Italian horror director Mario Bava. After her relationship with Argento ended in 1985, Nicolodi participated in such films as Macaroni, Notes of Love and her daughter Asia Argento's Scarlet Diva. In 2007, Nicolodi worked with Asia on Dario Argento's Mother of Tears, the sequel to Suspiria and Inferno.