Daria Nicolodi

Daria Nicolodi (19 June 1950 – 26 November 2020) was an Italian television and film actress and screenwriter, and associated mostly with the films of director Dario Argento.

Early life and career
Daria Nicolodi was born in Florence on 19 June 1950. Her father was a Florentine lawyer and her mother, Fulvia, was a scholar of ancient languages. Her maternal grandfather was composer Alfredo Casella. She moved to Rome in the late 1960s.

In 1970, she participated in the television variety show Babau which was shelved and only broadcast by RAI six years later. She gave her screen debut the same year in Francesco Rosi's Many Wars Ago. In 1973, she starred in Elio Petri's Property Is No Longer a Theft. She also appeared in TV productions, such as the miniseries Nicotera, Without a Trace with Rossano Brazzi (1972), Portrait of a Veiled Woman with Nino Castelnuovo (1975), the drama Saturnino Farandola with Mariano Rigillo (1978), and Rosaura at 10 (1981).

Nicolodi starred in five films directed by Dario Argento between 1975 and 1987: Deep Red (1975), Inferno (1980), Tenebrae (1982), Phenomena (1985) and Opera (1987). She later stressed that the screenplays for Argento's Suspiria and Inferno owed many ideas to her authorship, but received writing credit only for the former. During this time, she also appeared in Shock, the final film of Italian horror director Mario Bava. After her relationship with Argento ended in 1985, Nicolodi participated in such films as Macaroni, Notes of Love and her daughter Asia Argento's Scarlet Diva. In 2007, Nicolodi worked with Asia on Dario Argento's Mother of Tears, the sequel to Suspiria and Inferno.

Personal life
In the early 1970s, she had a relationship with the sculptor Mario Ceroli. They had a daughter, Anna, who was born in 1972 and died in a 1994 traffic accident. Nicolodi had a professional and private relationship with director Dario Argento; they met in 1974 during casting for the film Deep Red, and their daughter Asia was born in 1975. They separated in 1985.

Nicolodi died in Rome on 26 November 2020 at the age of 70 from undisclosed causes.

Legacy
In 2012, the retrospective Argento: Il Cinema Nel Sangue was held at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. It highlighted Nicolodi's contribution to Dario Argento's films as well as that of his father (Salvatore), brother (Claudio) and daughter (Asia).