Daria Nicoldi

I’ll be honest—giallo is not really my thing. This is giallo in the American sense, you understand, not the Italian one. Apparently, to Italians, that just means a mystery or thriller movie. To Americans, it’s a very specific sort of Italian horror. I find it stylistically interesting while at the same time not enjoy actually watching the movies themselves. The stills are arresting. One of the definitions of the genre is its visual style. It’s just that it also involves plot stuff that I find less appealing, and as we routinely establish throughout October, I’m not much of a horror person at the best of times.

Daria Nicoldi was part of one of those lines of Italian artistic families we have in this column sometimes. Her grandfather, Alfredo Casella, was a pianist, composer, and conductor who was conductor of the Boston Pops for two years. He’d spent time in Paris with people such as Stravinsky and Mahler. His grandfather, whose name is not listed on anyone’s Wikipedia page, had been a professional cellist and a friend of Paganini, which we’ll get back to. Her grandfather’s father had been a cellist, as were his grandfather’s uncles, and that grandfather had also married a pianist.

Nicoldi went in a different direction. She studied at the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome, and from there she moved to the stage. Apparently her planned TV debut was shelved, I’m not sure why—and the source for it is in Italian, which I don’t read. Anyway, that year she also appeared as a Red Cross nurse in an anti-war film, the first movie of her career. I assume it was a minor role. Probably if I knew more about Italian cinema of the ‘70s, I would be able to trace the path of who introduced her to whom.

Somewhere along there, however, she began working with Dario Argente. She was cast in his film Deep Red; they met and started a personal and professional partnership. The personal one would end after about a decade, but she appeared in several of his films after they broke up. She would even later in life appear in a film directed by their daughter, Asia. Mother and daughter also appeared in one of Dario Argente’s movies together as actresses. Meanwhile, she continued working with other directors.

It’s also worth noting that she wrote screenplays. She wrote Supsiria. Inferno was supposedly based on one of her stories, though it’s uncredited. A screenplay for which she was credited was Paganini Horror, directed and co-written by Luigi Cozzi. It’s about a group of women who inadvertently summon the spirit of Paganini from the dead. One assumes that it’s Paganini both because he’s a meaningful figure in the history of Italian music and because of her own familial connection to him. Part of the long family history and all.