Passage: Remembering Gina Lollobrigida and David Crosby

It happened this past week…

The actor once called “the most beautiful woman in the world,” Italian film star of the 1950s and ’60s Gina Lollobrigida, died in Rome.

Lollobrigida appeared in more than two dozen European films, before capturing the attention of American audiences in the early 1950s, when she starred in filmmaker John Huston’s “Beat the Devil” alongside Humphrey Bogart.

The release of an Italian-French period film in 1954 would land Lollobrigida on the cover of Time Magazine, which in some ways foreshadowed her second career, as a successful photojournalist in the 1970s, and the publication of several books.

In 1999, Lollobrigida unsuccessfully ran for the European Parliament. And just last year, she attempted to win a seat in Italy’s Senate.

Gina Lollobrigida died on Monday. She was 95 years old.

We lost another legend this past week, a music-maker of a generation: singer, songwriter and guitarist David Crosby.

An original member of The Byrds, Crosby had a huge hit in 1965 with “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a Bob Dylan song:

In 1968, along with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, he formed the folk-rock supergroup Crosby Stills & Nash, later adding singer-songwriter Neil Young.

Their acclaimed album “Déjà Vu” sold eight million copies. 

To hear CSN&Y perform David Crosby’s “Déjà Vu” click on the player below:

Rita Braver sat down with Crosby in 2008 for “Sunday Morning”:

Braver: “How’d you get top billing?”
Crosby: “It’s very simple: try saying it any other way.”
Braver: “Nash, Stills, Crosby? It’s okay. Probably Nash liked that!”
Crosby: “No, he didn’t. It doesn’t work any other way. One of them goes bum-ba da ba da, and none of the others…