Marisa Mell

Mell left her home city of Graz to attend the Max Reinhardt drama school where her fellow students briefly included Senta Berger. After four years in stage work, she began to appear in starring roles in European films.[1]

In 1963, she was involved in a serious automobile accident in France. For six hours, she lay unconscious, unaware that she nearly lost her right eye. The disfigurement extended to her lip as well. She spent the next two years undergoing plastic surgery, and no damage remained in her face except for a distinctive curl of her upper lip.[1]

After the Eurospy film Secret Agent Super Dragon (1966), she secured the title role in the "utterly calamitous" musical Mata Hari alongside Pernell Roberts. A preview performance in Washington, D.C. became infamous for its numerous technical problems, and producer David Merrick decided to close the production.[2] For the rest of her life, Mell had difficulty acknowledging the failure, which may have played a part in her moving to Italy where her stories of a successful Broadway run were not challenged.[3] She said she had turned down a lucrative seven-year Hollywood contract because "the contract was a whole book. I think that even to go to the toilet I would have needed a permission."[3] In 1968, Mell had her best-known film role as Eva Kant in Danger: Diabolik (1968), which initially was poorly received but has been championed by later film critics. At this time, Mell was appearing in what were by Italian standards major productions, which got American releases, such as Lucio Fulci's early giallo One on Top of the Other (1969). She suffered the death of a prematurely born daughter in 1969, and never had another child.[3][1]

Mell's name had been romantically linked with number of European and Hollywood male stars, but in Italy she was often the center of paparazzi stories along with Pier Luigi Torri, her aristocratic, nightclub-owing boyfriend. In 1971, he got into a series of legal difficulties over cocaine being supplied to his nightclub's clients, and fled the country on his yacht. After being arrested in London over a $300 million dollar gold mine and bank scam, and in an ironic echo of Danger: Diabolik, Torri got out the cell, made a daring and acrobatic rooftop escape, and evaded a huge search by infuriated English police; he eventually was recaptured in America after 18 months at large.[1] As one of the more recognizable beauties in Italian film, Mell continued to work steadily throughout the 1970s, and posed for Italian Playboy.[1]

Mel's marketability depended on her youth and stunning looks, which faded as she moved into middle age. Even in Italy where she had been a genuine celebrity, her box-office appeal had declined by the late 1980s to the point that she was not being considered for the lowest-budget exploitation films, and she resorted to posing for cheap, soft-porn magazines. With no support, Mell accepted the inevitable and returned to Austria to live in impoverished and isolated circumstances, with her decades of heavy smoking and substance abuse having affected her appearance so negatively that she appeared far older than her true age.[1] Mell's public profile was very low by her latter years although she got some acting work shortly before her 1992 death in Vienna, aged 53, from throat cancer.[1]

• Marisa Mell fansite
• Marisa Mell at IMDb