An actress from the era of romantic films

Anastasia Noris was born in St Petersburg on 26 February 1912, later known by the pseudonym Assia Noris, an Italian actress of Russian origin.
She was born in the then capital of the Russian Empire, Saint Petersburg; her father was a German officer, her mother a Ukrainian national. Following the Russian revolution she fled to France, moving to Italy in 1929.

She made her film debut in 1932 in Mario Bonnard's "Trois hommes en habit", but her fame is mainly linked to the films directed by Mario Camerini (to whom she was married from 1940 to 1943) and co-starring with Vittorio De Sica.

Her ability to play the character of the honest girl to perfection is one of the elements of the success of films such as "Il signor Max" (1937) and "I grandi magazzini" (1939): Assia Noris conquers the public with her exotic beauty and her fine and elegant acting style, naive and mischievous at the same time, becoming one of the great divas of Italian cinema of the 1930s.

In the eyes of a generation of Italians, she embodied the ideal of a woman with a capital 'W', as described in the songs of the time, the angelic heroine of a romantic world devoid of clouds and drama.
Her success continued with Mario Soldati's comedy "Dora Nelson" (1939) and with "Una storia d'amore" (1942) in which she proved her ability to tackle dramatic roles as well, but after the Second World War her star quickly waned.

One of the most emblematic episodes of her life was her encounter with Hitler, described by Assia Noris as a snowman with a fake nose, moustache and eyes, who, between spraying saliva on her face, asked her to act for UFA, but received an embarrassed negative response.
One of her acts that caused a stir among the Italians was her appearance, shocking and unusual at the time, in a two-piece costume, while some of her behaviour, considered to be out of keeping with the "ethics of the regime", cost her not only constant reproaches from the Ministry of Popular Culture and Minister Gaetano Polverelli, but also deportation to Germany.

Assia then tried her hand at the theatre and also acted in a few films abroad with disappointing results.
She surprised everyone by returning to the screen in 1964, after an absence of about fifteen years, in Carlo Lizzani's "La Celestina".
She returned to the theatre again but, unable to recover her lost success, she left the stage for good, deeply disappointed by the world of cinema, whose employees, forgetting what she had given to Italian cinema in the past, now considered her "out of fashion".

She died in Sanremo, after having lived there for over twenty years, in the civil hospital after being admitted due to an illness, on 27 January 1998 at the age of 85.
The funeral ceremony took place in the crowded Russian Orthodox Church and the body was buried in the cemetery of Valle Armea.

(source Marco Mauro from Wikipedia )