Pier Angeli, Actress, 39, Dies; Film Star in U.S. for 2 Decades
The New York Times
Angeli, Pier
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BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., Sept. 10 (UPI)—Pier Angeli, the Itai ian‐born actress and forme. wife of Vic Damone, the singer was found dead in her apart. ment today. She was 39 years old.

Miss Angeli's body was found by a friend, Helena Correll, who lived with her. Miss Car rell said the actress had been under a physician's care for stomach disorder.

An autopsy was scheduled for tomorrow to determine the cause of death.

Gained Fame in ‘Teresa’

“Soulful,” “demure” and “poignant” were adjectives oft en used by critics in describing Miss Angeli's early movie por trayals.

In the 1951 film “Teresa”— her second film and the one that brought her recognition as an up‐and‐coming film star— Miss Angeli played the role of a young Italian girl who leaves her family in war‐ravaged Italy to marry an American soldier. She thinks him a hero but when she arrives in the United States she learns that he is a shiftless weakling.

“Miss Angeli is a young lady with a spindly figure and wistful face but a wealth of revealing expressions and a beautifully warming smile,” Bosley Crowther, film critic of The New York Times, said. “And in her a great strength of character is modestly but forcefully conveyed.”

In the 1956 picture “Some body Up There Likes Me,” based on the life of Rocky Graziano, Miss Angeli played the wife of the boxer who fought his way from a life of crime to the world middle weight championship.

“In a movie that bursts with violence and fear, she is gentle and courageous and proves her self a fine and lovely actress,” one critic wrote.

But despite the prominence she gained in roles such as these, Miss Angeli also had an outgoing and lilting image in other roles—an image in keep ing with her sunny nature and pert disposition offstage. She played the part of a passionate Tahitian girl in a television pro duction of “The Moon and Six pence,” in which she appeared with Sir Laurence Olivier.

As a singer, she cut one rec ord of Italian songs in which her voice, a reviewer said, was “warm and surprisingly rich.”

Miss Angeli—who pronounced her first name “Peer” and who was christened Anna Maria Pierangeli—was born in Sar dinia in 1932. Barely over five feet tall and weighing about 100 pounds, she was discovered in Italy by the director Leonide Moguy while she was still teenager.

Her first film was the Italian “Tomorrow Is Too Late.” She had learned only a few words of English when she received the title role in Metro‐Goldwyn Mayer's “Teresa” the following year, 1951.

That year her twin sister, Marisa Pavan, also began an acting career.

Miss Angeli was divorced from Vic Damone, the singer, in 1958. A bitter custody battle over their son was not settled until 1965.

In 1962 she married Armando Travajoli, an Italian band leader.