Anny Papa

Anny Papa is an Italian actress. Raised in Salerno, Italy, she entered the entertainment industry after winning the Miss Cinema competition in the mid-1970s, which led to modeling and acting opportunities. She made her cinematic debut in 1978 with Das Lustschloß im Spessart before appearing in the Italian edition of Playboy magazine in September 1979. Over the following decade, she appeared in several genre films that established her presence in Italian cinema. Her most notable role came in the 1983 giallo horror film A Blade in the Dark, directed by Lamberto Bava, where she played a supporting role in this atmospheric thriller about a composer terrorized while writing a horror film score. She also appeared in other Italian productions including Sweets from a Stranger (1987) as Monica, Below Zero (1987) as Athena, and Camorra (A Story of Streets, Women and Crime) (1985) as Elena. Her filmography includes additional works such as Uccelli d'Italia (1985) and the television miniseries Piazza di Spagna (1992), where she played Ismene across three episodes. Later in her career, she made a brief return to television with a role as a pianist in the Italian soap opera Centovetrine in 2009. Though not extensively prolific, Papa established herself within Italian genre cinema, particularly horror and crime films of the 1980s. Her performance in A Blade in the Dark remains her most widely recognized credit and continues to garner attention from cult film enthusiasts and retrospective genre coverage. Anny Papa's career represents the trajectory of a beauty pageant winner who successfully transitioned into acting, contributing a memorable presence to several Italian thrillers and maintaining recognition among enthusiasts of Italian horror cinema for her work during the genre's notable period in the 1980s.