By using kinotuskanac. More info. In her teenage years, she fell in love with film and used every opportunity to go to the movies. At fifteen, she had a fight with her mother and moved to Paris. She worked as an extra on film sets and met Brigitte Bardot who knew her father and offered Maria a room in her house. So through Bardot, Maria met important people from the film industry. Among them Warren Beatty, who presented her to the William Morris agency through which she got her first role in Madly by the director Roger Kahane.
Afterwards she appeared in four more films in smaller roles. She had her first and most famous leading role in Last Tango in Paris L' ultimo tango a Parigi, by Bernardo Bertolucci, a controversial film that brought her worldwide fame but problems in private life. She later stated that because she was only nineteen at the age of filming the Tango , her acting partner Marlon Brando manipulated her and she never talked to the director after his film Novecento Eventually, she became a close friend to Brando but often criticized the film because after it she was always regarded as a sex symbol, rather than a serious actress.
She even refused a role in Caligola with the explanation that she was an actress and not a prostitute. The film she was always the most proud of was Profession: Reporter Professione: reporter, by Michelangelo Antonioni in which she starred opposite Jack Nicholson.
Eventually the film was finished and she stated that she checked herself in because of loyalty to her female lover she was one of the few actresses who in openly declared herself as bisexual who was in the same institution. This period of her life was characterized more by drug problems, overdoses and suicide attempts than film roles.
Nevertheless, in the s she defeated her drug problem with the help of an unknown person whose identity she never revealed. She had one of her better roles in the s in the films Merry-Go-Round by Jacques Rivette in which she co-starred with Joeo Dallesandro.
