Rosalina Neri’s opera debut in Britain was the stuff of a Hollywood movie — the Hollywood movie being Citizen Kane. Just as Charles Foster Kane’s young mistress is mocked for her performance at the opera house that he built for her, so Neri, known as “the Italian Marilyn”, was booed off the stage of the London theatre owned by her influential lover, the impresario and bandleader Jack Hylton, who had spent three years — and vast amounts of money — trying to make her a star.
On the opening night of the Gala Week of Italian Opera at the Adelphi Theatre in December 1959, she sang the part of Adina in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore with what one critic described as “a pipsqueak of a voice, often off-key”. Her habit of unconsciously tracing, with her left arm, the shape of the phrases she was trying to sing prompted sniggers, and by the third act the humiliated soprano was given the proverbial raspberry. Her understudy took over for the rest of the run.
Neri had arrived in Britain in 1955, having been banned from Italian TV after causing a furore thanks to her low-cut top. With peroxide blonde hair, a voluptuous figure and a gift for mimicking the signature poses of the biggest Hollywood star in the world, Neri was touted as “the Italian Marilyn” or “Marilina” when she came to London to make a coffee commercial. While she was here, she met the actress Diana Dors, who was often packaged as the English Marilyn. “It was thanks to her that I met Jack Hylton, my great love, at a party,” she recalled in 2016. “It was love at first sight.”
The couple embarked on what would be a long and tempestuous love affair. Hylton, who had been separated from his wife for 25 years and had subsequently fathered three children with two other women, showered her with gifts including £50,000 worth of jewellery, an Alfa Romeo open-top sports car and accommodation in the south of France.
Neri always stated that Hylton was the love of her life — despite the fact that he married another, even younger, woman, in 1963, and she found out about it from his secretary. The next time she appeared in a British tabloid, three years later, it was with her baby daughter, whose father’s identity she swore she would not reveal.
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Her affair with Hylton continued, or resumed, after his second marriage, and shortly after his death, in 1965, she gave birth to his daughter, Angela (known as Coco), though the baby’s paternity was a poorly kept secret for some time.
Throughout 1956, she was a regular on The Crazy Gang show on ITV, contributing a continental song to the proceedings and even duetting with Bud Flanagan on a medley of the hits he had recorded with his partner Chesney Allen. Indeed, she popped up and burst into song with what one writer described as “alarming frequency” on many Hylton productions in the late 1950s.
These ranged from Jack Hylton’s Monday Show — which, one week, featured Neri, pianist Winifred Atwell, whistler Ronnie Ronalde and presenter Hughie Green performing during a transatlantic flight to New York — to This Week, in which she appeared alongside Terry-Thomas, who contributed an impersonation of a Scottish Toulouse-Lautrec. Meanwhile, to counter complaints from viewers about her heavy accent, she took English lessons with the actress Evelyn Hall.
In Hylton’s 1957 series Hotel Riviera — a spin on the usual stage-bound variety show — she played a cabaret star who meets all sorts of amusing people while staying at a hotel. Unusually perhaps The Stage newspaper was effusive in its praise of her: “There was only one redeeming feature about this programme which Associated-Rediffusion offered its viewers and that was the presence of Rosalina Neri. This lovely Italian star is really wasted in this banal effort. The comedy relief is only a relief when it stops and Rosalina has a chance to sing.”
She returned to Italy in 1958 to study with the singing teacher Dino Borgioli. Explaining her plans to one British tabloid, she was reported as saying: “I wanta get outa da groove. I wanta sing serious. Glamour and sex … why, one getta tired of them.” Before she left, she contributed an Italian love song and a Spanish dance to an episode of Jack Hylton’s Monday Show. She said it gave her an opportunity to “show off my legs”.
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In 1959 Hylton gave her her own television series, The Rosalina Neri Show, which ran for nine episodes. The opera lessons did not impress the critics. The Liverpool Echo said: “Such was her handling of one number last night that it bordered on comedy, Rosalina being lovely to look at but rather ludicrous to listen to.” The series has come to be viewed, as the Hylton biographer Pete Faint said, “as the nadir of his entire career”.
Rosalina Neri was born in Arcisate in the Varese region of Lombardy, in 1927. Her father was a builder and her mother a housewife. The family were poor and the financial situation dashed her hopes of studying at university. Her performing career began in 1954, in musical comedy and on a variety TV show in Italy.
She took singing lessons, overcame the humiliation of her London opera debut and returned to the UK in 1962 to appear, with more success, at the Llangollen festival in Wales. “When I returned to Italy, the director Filippo Crivelli put me back on track,” she told il Giornale.
She went on to enjoy a long and impressive career working in opera and theatre in Milan, as well as in occasional films and TV shows. At the Piccola Scala — the smaller theatre of La Scala — her memorable roles included Mrs Trapes in The Beggar’s Opera, directed by Crivelli, in 1977 and Noah’s wife in Stravinsky’s The Flood, directed by Peter Ustinov, in 1982. She continued working into her nineties.
She never married — “I loved Jack as I would never love anyone again,” she said at the age of 90 — and chose to live alone for the last two decades. “My solitude is miraculous. Men have made me suffer too much.”
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Rosalina Neri, singer and actress, was born on November 12, 1927. She died on June 5, 2024, aged 96