You saw a photo of Italian beauty Nuccia Cardinali not long ago, but when you make shots as nice as hers a return engagement is mandatory. The last one showed her lighting up the French Riviera as a blonde, while this brunette image shows her— Well, we have no idea where she is, and maybe she doesn’t either. The shot was only published, as far as we know, as part of a series of cheesecake postcards in the mid-1960s.
Cardinali thrived in unusual media. She began her career in photo novels, which were a mainly European phenomenon, and basically were comic books with posed photos instead of illustrations. She karate chopped and headlocked her way through sixty-nine of those, then graduated to singing and released several singles in 1968.
She had already acted sporadically beginning in 1964, and had a steady run on the silver screen from 1971 to 1975, when she had eight credited roles, including in 1974’s Lo strano ricatto di una ragazza perbene, aka Blackmail, and 1975’s La tigre venuta dal fiume Kwai, aka Tiger from the River Kwai. We have a few other interesting photos of her, so maybe we’ll get back to her in a bit.
