[Leggi la biografia esclusiva in italiano!]

1964-1990

Childhood and modeling years

Monica Anna Maria Bellucci was born on September 30, 1964, in Selci Lama, a small hamlet near Città di Castello, Italy. Her father, Pasquale Bellucci, worked in a transport agency and was always travelling around, while her mother, Brunella Brigante, 19 years old at the time, stayed home and took care of their daughter.  As a child, Monica was very shy and not at ease played with other children, probably because she didn’t have any brother or sister. But she had a beautiful childhood, according to her memories of a caring mother and a loving father.

“I had wonderful parents who always let me free and with whom I could talk about everything – little crushes, love stories, sex, everything. I had a wonderful childhood because of this great relashionship with my parents. My mother was caring and sweet, always there for me. My dad adored me, he spoiled me and was always telling me that I was the most beautiful girl in the world. Maybe that’s why I grew up with such self-confidence”

Ever since she was a teenager, she was considered as “the beauty of the village” and everyone couldn’t help but notice her when she walked with her friends in the streets of Città di Castello city center. Monica was always quite a good student, giving her best in literary subjects, and she graduated from Liceo Classico Plinio il Giovane. Then she immediately moved to Perugia to attend law school at university. She would have preferred studying philosophy, but she told herself that with a law degree it would be easier to find a job and settle down.

Modeling began as a way of paying her tuition and it occasionally brought her to Milan, the Italian fashion capital. Soon this activity was stealing a major part of her time, so Monica decided to follow her independent soul and moved there in order to become a professional model, landing in a few months a contract with Elle Management agency and a cover on prestigious magazine Elle.

“At 19 years old, spending eight hours a day on books seemed crazy to me, when I could do a gratifying and well-paid job as being a model. It was my curiosity to discover the world [that made me leave Umbria]. I was like a little bird that leaves the nest when it feels ready.”

The catwalk gave her the opportunity to travel around the world and through it she met her first husband, photographer Claudio Carlos Basso, from whom she later separated and divorced. “There is nothing extraordinary in a marriage that comes an end. We remained very good friends and I admire him very much.” Monica became an international top model. Dolce & Gabbana elected her as the icon of the Mediterranean woman for a series of advertisements and she was immortalized by Richard Avedon for Revlon campaign “Most Beautiful Women”. But all this was not what Monica wanted for her life. She started dreaming about being an actress.

1990-2003

From runway to Hollywood

The occasion to fulfill the dream came thanks to the encounter with Enrico and Carlo Vanzina. Impressed by the intense expression in her eyes and by her breathtaking beauty, they introduced Monica to Dino Risi, one of greatest Italian directors of all times. This way, in 1990 she got casted for her first role in Risi’s tv film Vita Coi Figli. After starring alongside Giancarlo Giannini in her television debut and a small part in Briganti, she obtained two major roles in La Riffa and in Ostinato Destino. Critics didn’t spare her harsh reviews, labelling her as yet another model turned actress. But Monica didn’t give up. In 1992 Francis Ford Coppola personally chose her to play one of the vampire brides in his Dracula. It was Monica’s first landing in Hollywood. In 1994, she starred in I Mitici by Carlo Vanzina, while 1995 saw her opposite to Ben Kingsley in Joseph, a Tv Rai/USA production by Robert Young.

Frustrated by the situation of movie industry in Italy, 1996 Monica moved to France, country that adopted her more than willingly. L’Appartement represented a huge turning point not only for her career, but also for her personal life. Her performance in the successful romantic drama by Gilles Mimouni was awarded with a nomination for a César, the French equivalent to the Oscar, and on set she met Vincent Cassel, with whom she fell deeply in love. Monica kept working incessantly both in Italy and in France, sharing screen with Vincent in several occasions: Dobermann (1997), Come Mi Vuoi (1997), Compromis (1998), Méditerranées (1999), to name a few.

On August 3, 1999 Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci finally got married in Monte Carlo, France. Eight years later, in 2007, Monica recalled the moment Vincent asked her to marry him:

“It was one of the most romantic moments of my life. He gave me a lift from airport, stopped the car in the middle of the street and gave me a ring.  I said ‘thank you’, he said ‘since you’ll be gone for three months I just wanted to make you a present’. Then he stood for a moment and then he laughed and added ‘just joking, actually I wanted to ask you to marry me’. It was impossibile to say no”.

2000 was a fantastic year for Monica’s career. She was casted to play the alluring and seducing wife of Gene Hackman in Under Suspicion, thriller made in Hollywood starring Morgan Freeman as well. Back in Italy, she took the leading role in Giuseppe Tornatore‘s latest movie, Malèna. Tornatore had already directed her in a series of commercials for D&G and had decided to base an entire drama on her astonishing figure. Malèna was a huge success, in Italy and abroad, where Monica was unanimously acclaimed and consacrated as one of the most promising international actresses.

In 2001 Le Pacte des Loups by Christophe Gans was released in France theaters, becoming immediately a cult movie. The same approval would greet it later in other European countries and in the United States, brining even more visibility to Monica. Astérix & Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre, that came out a year later and in which she played an irresistible and capricious Queen of the Nile, was another unbelievable hit and France most profitable comedy ever. 2002′s Cannes Film Festival received with mixed reactions Gaspar Noé’s scandalous Irreversible, mostly because of the disturbingly realistic eight-minute rape scene, whose shootings constituted a real challenge for Monica. Cannes Film Festival, by the way, gave her another chance to shine: she was chosen as 2003 edition’s godmother.

In 2003, Italy got the chance to admire her in family drama Ricordati di Me by the talented and acclaimed director of “The Last Kiss” Gabriele Muccino. Wachowski brothers watched Malèna during a plane flight and decided to audition and cast her as femme fatale Persephone in the final two chapters of Matrix trilogy, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, that along with war movie Tears of the Sun, opposite Bruce Willis, amounted to another great chance to get known in the US.

2004-2007

The Diva and the Mother

2004 was an exciting year for Monica Bellucci. Although her agent strongly suggested her not to accept the part because of the lack of interested distributors, Monica appeared as Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson’s controversial The Passion of the Christ. The film was a worldwide unexpected winner at 2004′s box office, and it was followed by Spike Lee’s She Hate Me in which Monica plays a small part as the lesbian daughter of John Turturro’s character. After filming Agents Secrets, their last film together, a new challenge was on the way for the Bellucci-Cassel couple: they started planning for a family.

“I had never really thought about having children, actually I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. I visited my friends with children and when I left their home I was happy I didn’t have kids too. Then all of a sudden it hit me like a truck – I was on the set of The Passion of the Christ and Maya Morgestern was pregnant, I looked at her and at the kids around me with different eyes and then I realized I was ready and that I wanted my body to fulfill its functions, not only to look good in dresses”.

Deva Cassel was born on September 12, 2004 at the Fatebenefratelli hospital in Rome, Italy. While seven months pregnant with Deva, Monica posed nude for the Italian Vanity Fair magazine, raising her voice against Italian laws that prevent the use of donor sperm. Three months later she was again on Vanity Fair’s cover – this time with her newborn daughter, stating that she intended to take a break from acting. She took, in fact, a little time off from acting in movies and agreed with Vincent not to engage in common projects for a while in order to never leave Deva alone. But somehow they managed to find some time for a new project: the French dub for acclaimed Pixar movie “Robots”, starring Vincent Cassel as the voice of Rodney and Monica Bellucci as the voice of Cappy. Actually this wasn’t Monica’s first experience at dubbing cartoons: in 2003 she had been the  French voice for Marina in “Sinbad”.

By the way,  by February 2005, five months after giving birth, she was ready to work again, starting with filming Bertrand Blier’s Combien Tu M’imes?, a romantic comedy that had her playing as a high-suburb prostitute with all men at her feet:

“I switched from mother to prostitute, from prostitute to mother: I had my child waiting for me in the trailer while I was filming, and when the director called off the filming of these sexy  scenes I rushed to the trailer in order to breastfeed Deva. It was crazy but it was also interesting”.

Monica was back on screens in 2005 with The Brothers Grimm (filmed in 2003 in Prague) by visionary Terry Gilliam – in which she played the wicked Mirror Queen – presented at the Venice Film Festival, and in early 2006 with Combien Tu M’Aimes?. Perfectly balancing career and motherhood, Monica found enough time to work on a lot of projects: after a friendly cameo as a vampiresse in Kim Chapiron’s Sheitan (starring Vincent Cassel), filming for Italian/French production N – Io & Napoleone by Italian director Paolo Virzì started in August 2005 in Tuscany, Italy. N – Io & Napoleone was followed by Le Concile De Pierre, a film by Guillaume Nicloux, based on a novel by Jean-Christopher Grangé (“The Crimson Rivers”). Though it didn’t hit the box offices and went almost unnoticed in France and in Italy,  Le Concile The Pierre can be considered one of Bellucci’s best works: her acting is perfect, intense and emotional, and impressed the audience at the first edition of Rome Film Festival in October 2006, together with Virzì’s movie, another milestone in Monica’s career.

In the meantime her age (close to 45) and motherhood didn’t scare Bernard Fornas and John Galliano, who chose her as official ambassadress for Cartier and beauty icon for Dior makeup: in 2006 and in the years later she flew from a country to another for the opening of new Cartier luxury stores, while her beautiful face was all over the cities to promote the latest Dior beauty products. In 2007 the partnership with Cartier became even bigger when the Italian diva was asked to design her own line of jewelry: classic necklaces and earrings in white gold, pearls and diamonds were part of the brand new Monica Bellucci Collection.

2006 was also the year of the great come back to Cannes Film Festival: after being the godmother back in 2003, she was chosen as member of the jury representing Italy, together with Helena Bonham-Carter (UK), Zhang Ziyi (China), Samuel L. Jackson (USA), Tim Roth (UK), Patrice Leconte (France), Elia Suleman (Palestine), Lucrecia Martel (Argentina) and Wong Kar-Wai (China, also President of the jury). While working with the jury she also took the opportunity to present her latest project, a French noir movie directed by Alain Corneau and starring Bellucci and Daniel Auteil: Le Deuxième Souffle. Right after Cannes Film Festival Monica flew to Italy for the filming of Manuale D’Amore 2 – Capitoli Successivi, which ended up being a huge success at Italian box offices also because of a  huge promotion that was built around the on-screen relashioship between Italy’s most famous actress Monica Bellucci and Italian teenagers’ favourite loverboy Riccardo Scamarcio.

After the release of Shoot ‘Em Up, Michael Davis’ “rock and roll thriller” starring Monica and Clive Owen, in 2007 Monica Bellucci was approached again by director Gabriele Muccino (who directed her in 2003 in Ricordati di Me), who later directed her in a short movie for Italian TV: HearTango was a 10 minutes commercial for underwear brand Intimissimi in which Monica played 7 short different characters representing 7 different kinds of woman.

2008-present

The current years

In 2008 Monica Bellucci was the star of several French and Italian productions: “Sanguepazzo” by Marco Tullio Giordana, originally made for TV, was premiered in Cannes and released in May and “L’Uomo che Ama” by Maria Sole Tognazzi was released in October: both movies were a great opportunity to show Italian audience her acting skills.  “Ne Te Retourne Pas” by Marina De Van, a psychological thriller, had Monica sharing the screen with the legendary French fellow actress Sophie Marceau and was premiered in Cannes and released in May 2009. “Ne Te Retourne Pas” was followed by  Rebecca Miller’s “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee”, released in the UK during the summer of 2009. Monica’s character, sultry Gigi Lee,  didn’t have much time on screen but gave her the opportunity to share the experience with legendary and talented actresses such as Robin Wright Penn, Winona Ryder, Maria Bello, Alan Arkin and Julianne Moore.

It was time to get back to the United States. In June 2009 Monica joined Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel for Disney’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”,  as the witch and long time love of Nicolas Cage’s character, Veronica.  In the meantime, almost ten years after Malèna, Giuseppe Tornatore  and Monica Bellucci reunited for “Baarìa” (filmed back in 2008), the Italian epic movie about the director’s childhood memories. Though Monica’s part was a five-seconds cameo as a bricklayer’s girlfriend, the movie, released in September 2009, received much praise from the audiences from all the world and was nominated as best foreign picture at the Golden Globes 2010. Her last work of 2009 was “Omaggio a Roma”, a 20 minutes short film made for TV in order to promote the city of Rome. “Omaggio a Roma” was directed by the internationally acclaimed and legendary Franco Zeffirelli, starring Monica Bellucci and singer Andrea Bocelli as Tosca and lover Mario. Monica Bellucci was expected to be in Venice for the premiere of “Baarìa” and in Rome for the premiere of “Omaggio a Roma”, but she didn’t show up. Nobody knew that she was, in fact, expecting her second child.

Rumours started to swirl months later, in November 2009, when sources from the MediaPro Studios in Bucharest stated that Monica Bellucci was three months pregnant while shooting “The Whistleblower”, a movie starring Rachel Weisz and Vanessa Redgrave and directed by a first time director, Larysa Kondracki. Her rep didn’t confirm the news. It took the Cassel-Bellucci family three months to share the happy news: in February 2010 Vincent Cassel confirmed that they were expecting, and a month later Monica broke her silence with a photoshoot featured on italian Vanity Fair, while 8 months pregnant.

On May 20, 2010 Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel welcomed  in Rome (Italy) their second child: a daughter named Léonie.

«I have never been happier. I feel like flying, living a beautiful fairytale. I always try to enjoy every moment of this happiness. I am so blessed. I’d like to stop time. I only hope to live long enough to help my girls when they’ll need me. I only ask for twenty years of health. I never say “I gave my daughters life”. They gave it to me.»