Teresa Ann Savoy

Biography

Savoy was 18 years old when she appeared in the Italian adult magazine Playmen (October 1973), using an alias of "Terry". "Terry", who fled from home at 16, was living in a hippie community in Sicily and soon became an attention of the press.

In 1974, her acting career began when film director Alberto Lattuada (who discovered Federico Fellini and Silvana Mangano) gave her her first role in the film Le farò da padre aka La bambina, playing a intellectually disabled girl named Clotilde.

Her next film was Private Vices, Public Pleasures (Vizi privati, pubbliche virtù) (1975) directed by the Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó. The film told the story of the Crown Prince Rudolf, son of the Austrian-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph and his rebellion against his father. Teresa played the baroness Mary Vetsera, Rudolf's lover, but in Jancso's vision, she appears as a hermaphrodite.

In 1975 Savoy met Tinto Brass and they worked together in the successful film Salon Kitty (1976). In the film she played a young BDM girl (League of German Maidens, a female Nazi youth organization) who becomes a spy that poses as a prostitute for the SS Nazi paramilitary organization.

In 1976, Brass was involved in the film Caligula, produced by Bob Guccione, the owner of Penthouse magazine. Maria Schneider, who was to have played the role of Drusilla, Caligula's beloved sister and lover, walked out of the project when she decided she didn't want to do the nude scenes. She was replaced in the role by Savoy.

Savoy made a return to cinema in 1981 with La disubbidienza by Aldo Lado, where she played Edith, an attractive Jewish governess. The film covered events under the reign of the Republic of Salò. In the same year, director Miklós Jancsó worked with her again in the film A zsarnok szíve, avagy Boccaccio Magyarországon (The Tyrant's Heart) in which she played alongside Ninetto Davoli.

In the 80s, the career of Savoy was mainly filled with secondary roles as in the TV mini-series La Certosa di Parma (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1982), directed by Mauro Bolognini, where she played the minor part of Princess Pallavicino. In 1984, she was a terrorist in search of a traitor partner for killing in the very low budget movie Il Ragazzo di Ebalus (The Boy from Ebalus) alongside Saverio Marconi. Nevertheless, the most important secondary role that she played in this period was undoubtedly that of Maria di Gallese, the first wife of the writer and poet Gabriele D'Annunzio (played by Robert Powell), in the film D'Annunzio, directed by Sergio Nasca in 1987. In a 2007 interview for the Nocturno magazine, Savoy said that she appreciated to do secondary roles more than the lead ones. In 1986, she played another memorable part in the episode Addio Maschio Crudele from the TV series Quando Arriva il Giudice, directed by Giulio Questi.

In 2000, she made her last film appearance in La Fabbrica del Vapore, the first Italian digital movie.

She received the title of Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1989.

Savoy died of cancer on 9 January 2017 in Milan, where she lived with her husband and two children.

Partial filmography