Giulia Rubini

Giulia Rubini was discovered by the director Luciano Emmer who spotted her photo in her art photographer uncle's shop window. Emmer, casting for a heroine for his comedy High School (1954), auditioned 18-year old Giulia who passed the test and went on to star in the picture. Giulia then tended to be typecast as naïve ingénues in romantic drama (Le ragazze di San Frediano (1955)) or comedy (La banda degli onesti (1956)). She had a string of supporting roles in foreign productions (El Hakim (1957), The Night They Killed Rasputin (1960)) and peplum (Goliath and the Barbarians (1959), David and Goliath (1960), with Orson Welles as King Saul) and rounded off her career as female leads in a trio of spaghetti westerns (Ringo and His Golden Pistol (1966), Adios, Hombre (1967), Uno straniero a Paso Bravo (1968)). At her most ornamental in colourful adventure spectacles, filmed in exotic locales, Giulia enhanced pictures like Edgar G. Ulmer's Atlantean fantasy Journey Beneath the Desert (1961), the swashbuckler Rage of the Buccaneers (1961) (as Ricardo Montalban's love interest) and, as an Indian girl, in the German-Italian co-production The Mystery of Thug Island (1964), set against the background of the British Raj versus a sect of fanatical Kali worshippers. The latter was produced by Bavaria Film and released in the U.S. by Columbia, who offered Giulia a studio contract. However, having just learned of her second pregnancy and wanting to remain in Italy, she turned the offer down, choosing family life over career.