Argentina Brunetti

Biography

Brunetti was born Argentina Ferrau in Buenos Aires, Argentina to Italian parents; her mother was the Sicilian actress Mimi Aguglia. She began her show-business career at the age of three with a walk-on role in the opera Cavalleria Rusticana and followed in the footsteps of her mother, performing supporting roles on stage throughout Europe and South America. In 1937, she was placed under contract to MGM and began dubbing the voices of Jeanette MacDonald and Norma Shearer into Italian. She became a narrator for the Voice of America, interviewing American movie stars for broadcast in Italy. At the same time, she made her movie debut in the classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946) as Mrs. Maria Martini.

Brunetti wrote and performed in daily radio shows; she became a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, writing numerous articles on Hollywood personalities; she authored books, wrote music, and appeared in nearly 60 television programmes and almost 70 films. She hosted a weekly weblog on the Internet called Argentina Brunetti's Hollywood Stories, which her son plans to continue running, and wrote a biographical novel called In Sicilian Company. She continued to act into her nineties, most notably as a relative from the Old World who visits and stays with the (wrong) Barone family in a 1999 episode of Everybody Loves Raymond; her last role was in 2002.

Marriage

She wed Miro Brunetti, a foreign correspondent in Hollywood. The two helped to co-found the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. The couple had one son, Mario. Miro Brunetti died in 1966. Argentina Brunetti never remarried.

Last years/death

She moved to Rome in 2004 to be with her family and died there from natural causes on December 20, 2005, aged 98. With her death, the only adult actor in It's a Wonderful Life known to be still alive as of March 2017 is Virginia Patton (b. 1926), who played Ruth Bailey, the wife of George Bailey's younger brother, the war hero.