The Italian actress, celebrated for her roles in the films of the world’s best directors, is not burdened by the changes that age brings, and at the threshold of her sixth decade, she still figures as one of the most beautiful women in the world.
Italian actress Monica Belluccithanks to her charm and timeless beauty, she joined the legendary icons of Italian cinema such as Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida and Claudia Cardinale, who made their mark in world cinema with golden letters. This is proof that Italy is a hotbed of racial beauties of all-round talent that push the boundaries. In her more than thirty-year career, Monica Bellucci achieved equal success on the big screen and on television, and she collaborated with some of the most important directors of today, such as Francis Ford Coppola, the Italian Oscar winner Giuseppe Tornatore, with whom she shot the cult film “Malena” and Mel Gibson, with whom she worked “Passion”. She achieved an enviable career in Italian and French cinema as well as in Hollywood, so she acted alongside famous colleagues such as Keanu Reeves, Ben Kingsley, Gene Hackman,

Monica Bellucci was born on September 30, 1964 in Città di Castello, about fifty kilometers from Perugia, where she studied law. She grew up as a unit in the family of farmer Pasquale Bellucci and painter Brunella Briganti, whose beauty she inherited. It is said that even as a girl she was so beautiful that the chef of a restaurant refused to take money from her parents because he was fascinated by Monica’s appearance. Her teachers also admired her because she was an excellent student, and one of them even painted her. As a child, she was not very social, preferring to spend time with her parents rather than playing with other children. She loved to study and read books, and she saw herself as a lawyer in the future. At the age of sixteen, she entered the world of modeling, at the urging of local photographers.
“I grew up watching those goddesses, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Claudia Cardinale, Anna Magnani, but it was hard for me to even imagine how I could make a giant leap to the big screen from the small Umbrian village of Città di Castello. Becoming a lawyer seemed more feasible.” , she once said and revealed that during her studies at the University of Perugia, a friend took her to the Elite Model agency from Milan, where she was immediately offered a contract. Jobs began to line up all over the world, from Paris to New York, and she never returned to her studies. When asked if modeling was difficult for her, she once said: “It wasn’t. Being beautiful is enough for that job.”

In parallel with her modeling career, she started taking acting lessons, and was discovered by Francis Ford Coppola, who gave her her first major role in 1992 in the film “Dracula”, in which she played one of the three vampire brides. However, she gained world fame only in 2000 thanks to the main role in the film “Malena” by the famous Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore. In the story of the seductive wife of an Italian soldier in the Second World War who becomes the object of gossip in a small circle, she won over the audience and critics, and the film also earned an Oscar.
“I was offered the role personally by Tornatore, because I think Miramax wanted a more famous actress in that role. The producer was the notorious Harvey Weinstein, but I had no contact with him,” said Monica Bellucci.

After that film, directors began to take her seriously, so she was offered more and more interesting jobs. She filmed a lot in France, but also in Hollywood. Various roles were lined up, the most commercially successful of which were those in the second and third installments of the “Matrix” film series. Monica Bellucci attracted special attention of the public with the role of Mary Magdalene in the controversial movie “Passion” directed by Mel Gibson. With the demanding role of the biblical sinner, she moved away from her sexy image quite a bit, and numerous film critics praised her expressive acting in the Aramaic language.
The actress also had a notable career in French cinema, thanks to which she met her second husband, the famous actor Vincent Cassel. They fell in love in 1996 on the set of the movie “Apartment”, for which she immediately earned a nomination for the Cesar Award, and three years later they got married in the Principality of Monaco. Before Cassel, the actress was married to fashion photographer Claudia Bassa for four years, but she never mentioned the relationship publicly. She had two daughters with Cassel, now 18-year-old Deva, who is building a career as a photo model, and 13-year-old Leonie.

“I got pregnant with Deva at the perfect moment in my life. I was forty years old, I traveled, worked, appeared on red carpets and hung out too much with uninteresting people. I didn’t sleep for two years, and I breastfed Deva for nine months. But I was very happy to have become a mother, I didn’t mind any sacrifices,” the actress once said. She gave birth to her second daughter at the age of 45.
“I think that being a parent is a very difficult job because despite all our desire to be the best at it, we make many mistakes and there is simply no rule that will help you. I try to raise my girls with a lot of love and respect, and I think the most important thing is to talk a lot. When you are very young, even the smallest problems seem huge to you, that’s why a high-quality dialogue between children and parents is the only possible solution,” said Monica Bellucci, who lives in Paris with her daughters. She broke up with Vincent Cassel in 2013, allegedly because of his infidelity. After his divorce from Monica, the blue-eyed actor fell in love with the then 17-year-old model Tina Kunakey, whom he married in 2021, and married this year.
“You can’t demand someone to be completely faithful to you if you’re separated for two months because of filming…”, Monica once commented and hinted that there were problems in her marital paradise. And their relationship was certainly not helped by the fact that most of the time they lived at separate addresses to avoid the marital routine.
I think it’s romantic to not be with someone all the time. Because then you don’t get used to that person and you don’t take things for granted. Vincent and I are very different, but this formula of ours worked,” she declared. Vincent Cassel, whom many consider a skirt hunter and whom many have not forgiven for cheating on “the most beautiful woman in the world”, once spoke about his love with Monica stated: “I didn’t have many girlfriends in my youth. I was an active young man, I jumped from one relationship to another, and I was never with any girl for more than three or four months. Monica was my first true love and together we’re 15. I waited for a reason. I wasn’t the type of actor to date co-stars. I thought our relationship was going to be a huge disaster. The attraction between us wasn’t instant, which is amazing, I know, but yes, I courted her. Since then we’ve worked on nine films together and it’s fun to spend the whole day with someone you like. Monica has been in the public eye since she was 16 and taught me not to take myself too seriously, especially what I read about myself in the media. And I don’t think she’s in the business because of her beauty because she’s a brilliant actress first and foremost.”
Respect between former spouses has remained to this day. So Monica Bellucci spent part of the period of strict lockdown in 2020, due to corona, in Biarritz, Switzerland, where Cassel has a house, so that the daughters would be close to their father during that difficult period. The pandemic hit her older daughter Devi, who was just starting her modeling career at the time, the hardest.
“Such situations are more complicated when you are very young and want to see your friends,” said the actress, proud that her daughter is following in the same footsteps. Namely, Deva graduated, shoots campaigns, and already got her first role in the TV series “Cheetah”, inspired by the famous film of the same name by Luchino Visconti, in which Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale starred.
“One foot is living the normal life of a teenager, and the other is in the world of adults. She knows what it means to work. Social networks and internet media today help her generation because they can show their talent immediately, without the obstacles we had,” commented the proud mother.
After her split from Vincent Cassel, the actress was said to have started a relationship with Azeri billionaire Telman Ismailov, linked to the Russian mafia, who adored global glamour. In 2021, Ismailov was arrested in Montenegro on an Interpol warrant on charges of two murders, and Monica denied anything more than friendship with a suspicious rich man. For at least two years, she was in a relationship with French artist Nicolas Lefebvre, 18 years her junior. At the end of 2019, she told a magazine: “I have been with the same person for some time and everything is fine. The man I share my life with doesn’t do the same job as me, but he travels a lot, so we have a similar pace of life and he fully understands what I do.”
And in recent months, the actress has been in a relationship with the famous British director Tim Burton, allegedly since the end of 2022. and they seem in love like teenagers. They hold hands, kiss, laugh and do not hide how good they are together. They certainly have a lot in common – they come from the film world, and they both have two children with their former partners. Tim was in a relationship with actress Helena Bonham Carter for 13 years, with whom he has a son Billy (20) and a daughter Nell (16), so he shares the same parental concerns with Monica.
Basically, the world public cannot accept that the most beautiful and sexiest actress according to the choice of many magazines always finds men whose appearance cannot be included in the category of beauties. However, love is blind, and it remains to be seen whether Monica has finally found her prince, who also suits her because he lives in another city – London.

Post navigation