Paola Gassman (29 June 1945 – 9 April 2024) was an Italian actress.

Biography

Through her mother, Nora Ricci, Paola Gassman was a fifth generation actor, as Ricci was the daughter of actors Renzo Ricci and Margherita Bagni.

Gassman devoted herself almost exclusively to the theater, with the exception of some sporadic but significant television appearances in comedies and scripts. At the beginning of her career she spent three years in the Milan company Teatro Libero, directed by Luca Ronconi. She performed in their show Orlando furioso, which toured in many European countries and in the United States before being adapted into a television series. Also during that period, she performed in the shows La tragedia del avengeratore and Cucina. She then joined the Brignone-Pagliai company, where she performed in Ibsen's Spectra and Fabbri's Family Process.

Gassman was directed by her father, Vittorio Gassman, onstage. With the theatrical company Pagliai-Gassman staged many shows both in the dramatic and in the comic and brilliant genre. She had a long period dedicated to Luigi Pirandello. She also performed in Goldoni's The Liar, Georges Feydeau's The Cat in the Pocket, Svevo's Wedding Scenes, and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

She acted with directors such as Squarzina, Bolognini, Sciaccaluga, and Ronconi. Her later shows included Miller's Down from Mount Morgan; Crouse's Life with Father; Mary Coyle Chase's Harvey; Iphigenia in Aulis and Helen (both by Euripides); and Viaggio a Venezia and La Bottega del Caffe (both by Goldoni).

In recent years with Ugo Pagliai, she dedicated herself to poetry and to all those pieces that are linked to memory and repertoire. In 2007, she published the autobiography A big family behind your back through Marsilio Editori.

Personal life and death

Gassman was a companion of the actor Ugo Pagliai, whom she never married, and whom she shared one son: Tommaso.

She and her then-husband, actor Luciano Virgilio, had a daughter; Simona Virgilio known at the National Academy of Dramatic Art "Silvio D'Amico" (exactly as Paola's parents had done twenty years before).

Her father Vittorio Gassman died of a heart attack on her 55th birthday.

After a prolonged illness, Paola Gassman died in Rome on 9 April 2024, at the age of 78.