Pier Angeli
Nude

Anna Maria Pierangeli created her stage name by splitting her last name in half. Her twin, actress Marisa Pavan (born Maria Luisa Pierangeli) simply made up her name. Pier was the wife of 50’s recording artist, Vic Damone, by whom she had one son, Perry Damone who became a DJ for 99.9 FM in Phoenix Arizona, though she also wedded Italian composer Armando Trovajoli. Although the angelic young lady won a Golden Globe for “New Star Actress of the Year” for just her third film, Teresa (1950) her life and antics were as much in the news as her films. Typically she would make 2 or 3 movies and then live hard until she had to make 2 or 3 more. Although she was at one point engaged to Kirk Douglas, with whom she starred in The Story of Three Loves (1953), the great love of her life was James Dean, with whom she was very much in love. But because he was not Catholic, her mother helped arrange Pier’s marriage to Vic Damone instead. In one of her last letters, she wrote that the only man she ever really loved was the rebel himself, James Dean. Leaving behind work in classics like Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) and The Angry Silence (1960), rather than turn 40 she committed suicide, shortly after her only film with brief nudity was released: In the Folds of the Flesh (1970) where we see a brief nip slip as she leans over a man’s body. After filming her final role, that of Susan Lowry in the Mexican monster flick Octaman (1971). Pier was found dead due to a barbiturate drug overdose in her Beverly Hills, California home. As her lost love famously said, “live fast, die young, and have a beautiful corpse.”