Lucia Modugno

Lucia Modugno was born in Bari, in the southern Italian region of Apulia, on 9 July 1932. Published reports on her death gave few details of her family or training, describing her as an actress of eclectic formation who came to the screen with a background in the theatre. She was later based in Rome, where she lived and worked for most of her career.

Modugno made her film debut in 1959 in Roberto Rossellini's Il generale Della Rovere, playing a young partisan opposite Vittorio De Sica. The same year she appeared in the RAI television drama Il romanzo di un maestro. In 1960 she was in Lucio Fulci's musical comedy Urlatori alla sbarra, and in 1961 in Alessandro Blasetti's Io amo, tu ami and Richard Fleischer's Barabbas.

The 1960s were her busiest decade on screen. She appeared in Dino Risi's I mostri (1963), Mario Bava's La ragazza che sapeva troppo (1963), Ettore Scola's Se permettete parliamo di donne (1964), Jean Delannoy's Les Sultans (1966), Sergio Corbucci's Navajo Joe (1966), the western Due once di piombo (1966), Norman J. Warren's Her Private Hell (1968) and Bava's Diabolik (1968), as well as peplum films, comedies and thrillers. In all she acted in more than 30 films. On television she appeared in Il segno del comando (1971), Anna Karenina (1974) and Madame Bovary (1978).

In the theatre she acted with Emma Gramatica in Six Characters in Search of an Author, with Aldo Fabrizi in Nuda no, mettiti gli occhiali and with Macario in Finestre sul Po, and in plays by Plautus, Aristophanes, Garcia Lorca and Pirandello. In 1980 she founded her own company, recognised and funded by the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment from 1981 to 1991, and over thirty years she acted in, directed and frequently wrote its productions, from comedies such as Agrodolce con pepe to Feydeau, Shaw and Moravia. Its final production was L'occhio di Eros in 2010.

From 2009 she returned to the screen in cameo roles, including Pupi Avati's Gli amici del bar Margherita (2009) and Il fulgore di Dony (2017), Francesco Amato's Lasciati andare (2017) and Gabriele Muccino's Gli anni piu belli (2020). In 2022 she joined the main cast of Home Sweet Rome, a series created by Michael Poryes.

Alongside acting and directing, Modugno published five books: Vengo a prendere il caffe da te (2005); Dietro le quinte. Dallo schermo al palcoscenico. Confidenze (in)confessabili (2009); the novels Affollatissima solitudine (2015) and Sonata a quattro mani (2018); and Pirandello, questo mio sconosciuto (2023), about Antonietta Portolano, the wife of Luigi Pirandello. Several of her books won literary prizes. She kept her private life largely out of the press, and reports on her death did not detail her family.

Lucia Modugno died on Monday 2 November 2026 at the Tiberia Hospital in Rome, aged 94. Her family announced the death through the news agency Adnkronos and did not disclose the cause. Her funeral was arranged for Thursday 5 November at 11 am at the parish church of San Giuliano Martire on Via Cassia in Rome. Italy's culture undersecretary Lucia Borgonzoni paid tribute, saying that with her Italy had lost a refined professional who had worked with the greatest Italian directors, from Rossellini to Risi and Scola.

Modugno is remembered as one of the actresses who linked the golden age of Italian cinema, from Rossellini and Risi to Bava's influential gialli and the spaghetti western, with the stage, where she spent three decades as an independent actor manager. Her film work, particularly La ragazza che sapeva troppo, Diabolik and Navajo Joe, remains well known to admirers of Italian genre cinema, while her late appearances for Avati and Muccino and her books kept her working into her nineties.