Gabriella Giorgelli, an Italian actress and model, was renowned for having the most beautiful eyes in Italian cinema. Born in the small hamlet of Fossola, near Carrara, in the region of Tuscany, she was the daughter of a businessman and his homemaker wife.
When Gabriella was just ten years old, her parents separated, and she was sent to a Catholic college in Carrara. Five years later, she began working various jobs to support her ailing mother, including stints as a clerk, typist, secretary, barmaid, and pizza chef.
In addition to her work, Gabriella entered several beauty contests, eventually becoming a Miss Italia finalist. However, she was eliminated from the competition after it was discovered that she had lied about her age. Despite this setback, her work as a photographic model led to a magazine cover that caught the attention of director Damiano Damiani, resulting in her film debut in Arturo's Island (1962).
Her second film, The Grim Reaper (1962),marked the directorial debut of Bernardo Bertolucci, in which Gabriella played the role of a dominating prostitute partner of a pimp, one of several suspects in a brutal murder.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Gabriella alternated between second leads and supporting roles in various genre films, including eight spaghetti westerns, a number of sex comedies, and the occasional art house film. She seemed to have a predilection for playing unpretentious characters, once stating, "I'm not very good with dialects, and I have often played commoners from different places."
One of her most notable performances was in Bruno Corbucci's "poliziottesco" comedy Delitto sull'autostrada (1982),where she played the role of Cinzia Bocconotti. Her western leading roles included Mickey Hargitay's love interest in Uno straniero a Sacramento (1965) and that of Giuliano Gemma in Long Days of Vengeance (1967).
In a rare villainous role, Gabriella co-starred alongside Klaus Kinski in The Beast (1970) as one of a trio of crooks posing as a kidnapped heiress in order to collect a lucrative inheritance. Gabriella's last screen credit was in 1999.
