From variety to cinema, from films with Totò to television and theatre, Isa Barzizza, who passed away on May 28 in Palau at the age of 93, was one of the most significant performers of our show and we want to remember her with you.
Yesterday 28 May in the evening the news of the disappearance of Isa Barzizzalegendary name of our show, long alongside Toto both in the theater and in the cinema, a multifaceted actress who came from the magazine to television and the busiest theater. She was born in Sanremo on November 22, 1929 she disappeared in Palau, Sardinia, where she had lived for 40 years and from where she occasionally returned to Rome. Whoever writes about her had the enormous pleasure of seeing her on stage and meeting her at the Vascello theater in 2015, in the show by Caterina Venturini Mar del Plata (Nipote nº 500), on the mothers and grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo looking for their children and grandchildren who disappeared during the years of the Videla dictatorship. Her emotion in talking to her about her had immediately dissipated in seeing her simplicity and sympathy and her extreme availability in acting alongside non-professional actors, with whom she had immediately felt at ease with her, without ever leverage her decades of experience. A woman of rare sympathy and simplicity, who perhaps deserved a little more recognition from our country, even if we are sure that her life was not only long, but also serene, despite the painful mourning for her death of the husband Charles Albert Church in a car accident, which three years ago he recalled, moving, on Domenica In.
The career of Isa Barzizza
Isa Barzizza she was the daughter of the famous conductor and composer Pippo Barzizza, one of the masters of swing in Italy, author of famous songs and soundtracks, as well as a protective and strict father who did not look kindly on the career undertaken by his daughter from a very young age, as she herself had repeatedly told. Despite her opposition, the young Isa after high school and her first theatrical experiences enters the company of Macario: the father gives consent as long as she is always accompanied by a governess. For her beauty and her irony, Isa Barzizza imposes herself as one of the protagonists of the variety theater in the post-war period and after Macario she meets her second Pygmalion, Totowhich he supports on the stage and alongside which he is the protagonist of many films, starting with The two orphans of 1947. After her husband’s death in 1960, when she was just 31 years old, to devote herself entirely to her daughter she abandoned the brilliant theater and cinema, to which she returned in 1974 to We had loved each other so much by Ettore Scola. In the 1960s she founded a dubbing company and in the 1990s she returned to theater and television. Her last big screen appearance was in 2013, in the film by Fausto Brizzi Guess who’s coming for Christmas? Among his appearances in the 2000s we remember: the TV series Let’s not break up anymore, Valeria coroner, Throw the moon and movies A boundless youth, Long live Italy, Illegal study.
In addition to his daughter Carlotta, Isa Barzizza he leaves two grandchildren, Martino and Nicola. Today the funeral at 17 in the church of the Redeemer in Palau: it was the parish priest who broke the news of the disappearance of this brilliant and lively woman, tried by life but never tamed, whom we remember with gratitude and affection. These, if you want to see them again, are the titles of the films that saw her next to Totocapable of keeping up with the inexhaustible comic talent and improvisation of the actor: The two orphans, fifa and arena, Toto in the tour of Italy, The firefighters of Viggiù, The Six Wives of Bluebeard, Figaro here, Figaro there, Seven hours of trouble, All in color, A Neapolitan Turk, Totò seeks peace.
