Alida Valli, one of Italy's most acclaimed and popular actresses, who is fondly remembered as the leading lady in the brilliant post-war thriller The Third Man (1949) co-starring Orson Welles, died on April 22 of natural causes in Rome. She was 84.

She was born Alida von Altenburger on May 31, 1921 in Pola, Italy (now Pula, Croatia), but her family relocated to Como, Italy when she was 15. After some brief training in dramatics as a teenager, she made her film debut in bit parts with a series of small Italian films in the mid '30s, but she soon progressed to leading lady status by the early '40s in such popular wartime movies as Little Old World (1941) and We the Living (1942).

In 1947, producer David O. Selznick brought her to the United States as his new European hopeful. With her dark, cool, immaculate beauty; and with her name shortened to "Valli," she made a good start in Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case (1947) opposite Gregory Peck, but her next film, the ghastly, pretentious misfire The Miracle of the Bells (1948) kept audiences away in droves. She regained her footing as the bewitching woman who mystifies Joseph Cotten in Sir Carol Reed's critically revered The Third Man (1949), but the remainder of her Hollywood career: Walk Softly, Stranger (1950) and The Stranger's Hand (1952) were forgettable vehicles for an actress of her caliber.

She returned to Italy and starred in Luchino Visconti's Senso (1954) and after her success in that movie, she followed up with Michelangelo Antonioni's superb character study of betrayal in Il Grido (1957) with Steve Cochran; and got her first taste for horror movies in Georges Franju's poetic Eyes Without a Face (1959). Her film work in Europe was steady and in time she developed into a fine character actress. She made rare appearances on two popular American series in the '60s: Dr. Kildare and Combat!, but by the '70s she found herself playing character roles for a surprising array of directors: Mario Bava for his cult thriller Lisa and the Devil (1973), Bernardo Bertolucci in his sprawling, episodic 1900 and George P. Cosmatos in the opulent adventure yarn The Cassandra Crossing (both 1976).

In 1991, she was honored with a career achievement statue at the David di Donatello awards, the Italian akin to the Oscars®. She is survived by her two sons; Larry and Carlo De Mejo.

by Michael T. Toole