Elli Parvo was also known as Elly Parvo and Elly Pardo, but was born in Milan as Elvira Gobbo. In Italian, “gobbo” would most likely be pronounced with a long “o,” like “hobo,” but most English speakers would pronounce it sonically close to “garbo.” That word—garbo—brings up good associations because of the actress Greta Garbo, and as a bonus it’s actually a Spanish word that means “grace” or “elegance.”
So that got us pondering how gobbo sounds so bad to our brains, while garbo sounds so good, though they’re nearly identical words. This in turn got us to thinking gobbo might actually mean something lovely in Italian, and if we learned its translation we’d have a new association for the word, and in the same way garbo must have sounded weird to English speakers until it became associated with a beautiful actress, gobbo could be transformed from sounding like something you dredge up from your lungs, similar to an Affleck or a Ruffalo, to something beautiful.
So we plugged the word into the translator and you know what it came up with? “Hunchback.” Really. So, from humble beginnings, Elvira Gobbo made the smartest move of her life by changing her name and, as Elli Parvo, became one of the biggest stars and most desired sex symbols of Italian cinema, appearing in fifty films between 1934 and 1960. The above shot is from 1947’s I fratelli Karamazoff, and she’s hoping to down enough shots to black out any recollection of being a member of the hunchback family.
