Nadia Gray – Romanian Film Actress

Nadia Gray (23 November 1923 – 13 June 1994) was a Romanian film actress.

Born Nadia Kujnir-Herescu in Bucharest, she left Romania for Paris in the late 1940s to escape the Communist takeover after World War II. Her film debut was in L’Inconnu d’un soir in 1949. Perhaps her most well-known role was in the Federico Fellini masterpiece La Dolce Vita in 1960.

She played Number 8 in "The Chimes of Big Ben", an episode of the 1960s cult television series The Prisoner.

Personal life

She was first married to Constantin Cantacuzino, a Romanian aristocrat who was one of Romania’s top fighter aces of the war. They were married from 1946 to his death in 1958. Her third husband was Manhattan attorney Herbert Silverman. They were married from 1967 to her death in 1994. She died in New York City.

Partial filmography

Most of Gray’s films were non-English-language productions.

• The Spider and the Fly (1949)
• Night Without Stars (1951)
• Top Secret (1952)
• Wife For a Night (1952)
• Casa Ricordi (1954)
• The Captain’s Table (1959)
• La Dolce Vita (1960)
• Candide ou l’optimisme au XXe siècle (1960)
• Mr. Topaze (1961)
• Maniac (1963)
• The Oldest Profession (1967)
• Two for the Road (1967)
• The Naked Runner (1967)
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The Turkish Stripper Who Inspired “La Dolce Vita” Is Gone

Aiche Nana, the Turkish belly dancer and stripper whose story inspired the late Italian director Federico Fellini to make his classic film La Dolce Vita, died on January 30th 2014 at the age of 78.

Nana (above), whose real name was Kiash Nanah and who died at a hospital in Rome, shot to fame when she performed a strip-tease at a restaurant in Rome in 1958.

The sequence was shot by Tazio Secchiaroli, the legendary street photographer who was the model for the character Paparazzo in the 1960 film that starred Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni.

Police raided the Rugantino restaurant while the party was still in progress and closed it for offending public morality, but Secchiaroli managed to get out with the roll of pictures of Nana stripping only to her underwear.

The photos created a scandal when they were published several days later, but Fellini seized on the episode as inspiration for a film he had been wanting to make about the idle, wealthy cafe society in Rome.

The Oscar-winning director re-created the strip scene in the film, with actress Nadia Gray playing Nana.

Nana went on to play small parts in several films by Italian directors, including a role in Story of Piera by Marco Ferreri in 1983.

Nana was one of the last major protagonists of Rome’s Dolce Vita years. Fellini, Mastroianni and Secchiaroli are all dead. Anita Ekberg is still alive, aged 82.

Text from Reuters UK Edition

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• Film stars live La Dolce Vita in photography exhibition (theguardian.com)

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