Trivia

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.