- Born
- Died
- Birth nameMaria Esther Beomonte
- She was born in Buenos Aires with the name of Maria Esther Beomonte in 1916. She moved to Italy when she was 16 years old and she started her career with the movie "L'arcobaleno" ("The rainbow"). She very quickly became one of the most popular and successful actresses of the 30s and the 40s, she was the prototype of the typical girl of Rome's bourgeoisie and she worked with the most important Italian directors of her time (Alessandro Blasetti, Mario Camerini, Ferdinando Maria Poggioli, etc.). In the 50s she left the big screen and she became an appreciated internal decorator. She released an autobiography at the end of the 90s. Maria Denis died the 15th of April 2004 in Rome.- IMDb mini biography by: FrANcE_it
- During the war, Maria Denis was linked to Pietro Koch, the notorious Roman police chief during the Nazi occupation of Rome in 1944. After the war, at her trial on charges of collaboration, she succeeded in convincing the court that she was only taking advantage of Koch's infatuation to help anti-fascists getting released, in particular the film director Luchino Visconti, with whom she was infatuated (Visconti had been arrested and imprisoned for political sympathies closely linked to the partisans). She was subsequently acquitted. Throughout his life, Visconti claimed that Denis's involvement in his release was simply not true and refused to appear in court during her trial. Still she maintained her story in her autobiography, "Il gioco della verità" ("Truth or dare") and again in the documentary director Gianfranco Mingozzi was making about her shortly before her death.
- Sister of actress Michela Belmonte.
- After the war she was briefly arrested for collaborationism.
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