22.00 USD
Here at Red Poulaine, we have a special place in our hearts for the Italian actress images of the early 1900s and into the 1920s. The quality of the portrait photography and subsequent postcard publication was particularly rich, with a flair for the dramatic and mysterious.
Many of our favorites, like Anna Fougez and Nella Regini, began their careers as sciantose, a variation on the French term chanteuse, meaning female singer, but bringing to it other meanings, and implying a dark, mysterious, exotic quality that appealed to the theater going public at the time, and certainly appeals to us :) Naturally we love all of our images or we probably wouldn't purchase them for our shop, and feel an almost filial affection for the performers onto whom we project imagined personalities and traits (is that weird? :)
But there is something about what seems to have been at the time a very Italian penchant for carrying the illusion of the stage and screen out into the public venue, a tendency to make even larger, the already "larger than life" persona of the theatrical personality, that we really love. So we have decided to open a new section devoted exclusively to these Italian artistes. We call it "La Bella Donna," and yes it is a bit of a play on words, given the tendency in many of these cards to focus on qualities of the "femme Fatale" variety. We hope you will enjoy these images as much as we do.
Like the famous Italian sciantosa Adele Croce, who took the stage name Yvonne de Fleuriel, there were many Italian actresses of this period who assumed French names to enhance their romantic image. Isa Bluette (1898-1939), born Teresa Ferrero, was perhaps one of these, but bluette is also an Italian term for the color cornflower blue, and the flower was adopted by many, in her time, as symbolic of love and loyalty to the soldiers who came home from the battlefields in WWI.
Born into a working class family, as a young girl Teresa, whom everyone knew as Teresina (she was quite petite), worked in a cigarette factory in Turin to put food on the table. She dreamed of becoming a famous actress and started by performing in little cafe-concerts in her home town. Apparently it was a hard, uphill road. After being heckled during a performance by a local who knew her from the factory, she made up her mind to reinvent herself and start fresh.
As Isa Bluette, it wasn't long before she began to get better bookings and to rise in fame and popularity. She has been credited with bringing the "cat walk" to Italy, and that particular stage routine wherein the female performer interacts with a number of men in tux and tails in a song and dance. She was expert in the light operetta, and variety, often playing off comic male sidekicks. One such sidekick was Nuto Navarrini, with whom she performed with great success. Their partnership apparently turned to romance, a relationship viewed by the Italian people with much the same enthusiasm as that of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks back here in the USA.
But it wasn't until November of 1939, as she lay on her deathbed, that she and Nuto were finally joined together in marriage. Thousands attended her funeral.
We are very grateful to Massimiliano Ferrero for his wonderful article on Signorina Bluette, from which we gathered almost all of the information for our listing. A link to that article, in translation from the Italian, is just below.
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=http://massim.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/isa-bluette-storia-di-una-diva-dimenticata/&prev=/search%3Fq%3Disa%2Bbluette%26newwindow%3D1%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26hl%3Den%26biw%3D727%26bih%3D434
Postage is for first class shipping in a secure photo mailer, and we happily combine shipping on all paper goods. If you purchase two cards, we will refund the postage on the second card, and when you purchase three or more cards from us at the same time, your shipping will be entirely free, except for international orders which, because of sudden increases in international shipping rates will still be charged one card's shipping fees on orders of three or more.
And please come visit our blog at:
redpoulaine.blogspot.com
where we post biographical and historical tidbits, images of cards and photographs for sale, some already sold but remembered fondly, related images of historical interest and sometimes even images of items that have not yet arrived in the shop, but that are expected to arrive soon, as well as coupon codes, links to other related sites, and more!.