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Dria Paola (1909-1993) was an Italian film actress of the 1930s and 1940s. Her name is attached to the first Italian sound film La canzone dell’amore (1930) by Gennaro Righelli.

Dria Paola was born Pietra Giovanna Matilde Adele Pitteo in Rovigo, Italy, as the daughter of a owner of hunting arms store and a cafe owneress. Already at a young age, little Etra showed artistic temperament, dancing at he age of three and reciting when she was ten, initally working for he company of Carlo Lombardo. After adopting the exotic and mysterious name of Dria Paola, she managed to get a small part as Neda in the late silent epic Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei/The Last Days of Pompeii, (1926), directed by Carmine Gallone and Amleto Palermi, and starring Victor Varconi, Rina De Liguoro and Maria Corda. A more substantial part Paola had in Sole (1929), the late silent film by Alessandro Blasetti – his debut as film director - on the drainage and cultivation of the marshlands near Rome, the Agropontino. Unfortunately less than a quarter of the film remains, while the nazi’s destroyed the negative during the war.

While Sole wasn’t a public success, Dria Paola was more fortunate with the successive film, La canzone dell’amore (Gennaro Righelli 1930), the first Italian sound feature, entirely produced in Italy. The quite absurd story about a young woman who adopts the baby her mother gave birth to was taken from a story by Luigi Pirandello, In silenzio. While her mother dies giving birth, Lucia adopts little Ninni, pretending to her fiancé Enrico (Elio Steiner) and her landlady it is her own child. Lucia breaks up her engagement with Enrico, who is about to become a big musician. Lucia’s rival Anna, played by another upcoming star: Isa Pola, gets hold of Enrico. But when Lucia and Enrico later on meet in the big record store where Lucia works and where Enrico is making a record, he admits he still loves her. The father of the child (Camillo Pilotto) shows up and claims the child. Heartbroken, Lucia gives in but tries to commit suicide afterwards. Just in time Enrico saves her, the father gives the child to Lucia and all is well. The film opens and closes with images of Rome, and is actually one of the few Italian films from the 1930s showing the city repeatedly. Stylistically important are the different moments of double framing, when Lucia looks out from her rented rooms and mimics neighbours how to change diapers and feed the child. Interesting is also Righelli’s visualisaton of Lucia’s frenzy at her suicide attempt and his pans across the enormous set of the record store. La canzone dell’amore had its premiere on 7 October 1930 at the Supercinema in Rome (the actual Teatro Nazionale). The film was a popular success, not in the least because of the music composed by Cesare Andrea Bixio, whose well-known song Solo per te Lucia became a hit as well. The film also caused two foreign remakes, one in German (Liebes Lied, Constantin J. Davis) and one in French (La derničre berceuse, Jean Cassagne).

Dria Paola was a star overnight. By now the thin actress with the big head and fluttering hands was typecasted as the fragile and sometimes clumsy damsel in distress. At the death of her father in 1932 she moved to Rome with her mother. After the avant-garde film Vele ammainate (1931), the only sound film by Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Dria Paola again played with Steiner in the biopic Pergolesi (1932) by Guido Brignone, and she had the lead in Fanny, (1933) by Mario Almirante, and based on Marcel Pagnol’s famous play, the sequel of his Marius. While audiences liked Almirante’s Fanny, the press considered the film too stagey. The same happened with the original French adaptation of Fanny (1932) by Marc Allégret. Raimu, Pierre Fresnay and Alida Rouffé played the leads of César, Marius and Fanny, while in the Italian version Mino Doro played Marius and Alfredo De Sanctis César.

Opposite a young Vittorio De Sica as shoplifter, Paola played a department store worker in Righelli’s Il signore desidera? (1933). Following leads were in La fanciulla dell’altro mondo (Righelli 1934) and La cieca di Sorrento (Nunzio Malasomma 1934), while she played supporting parts in Il colpo di vento (Carlo Felice Tavano 1936) starring Ermete Zacconi, and L’albero di Adamo (Mario Bonnard 1936) starring Elsa Merlini. Righelli gave Paola a lead again in the Pirandello comedy Pensaci, Giacomino! (1936) starring Angelo Musco as a professor who marries the daughter of his caretaker, who is pregnant. After supporting roles in the Raffaele Viviani drama L’ultimo scugnizzo (Righelli 1938), L’albergo degli assenti (Raffaele Matarazzo 1939), and Lotta nell’ombra (1939) by former acrobat turned director Domenico Gambino, Righelli provided another female lead for Paola in the historical drama Il cavaliere di San Marco/The Knight of San Marco (1939), starring Mario Ferrari. After a bit part in La

Alice Faye was one of the most popular musical stars in the golden era of Hollywood.

From the late 1930s to the mid-1940s she was a top box- office attraction in such films as Alexander's Ragtime Band and That Night in Rio, and composers Jule Styne and Irving Berlin were among those who praised her melodic distinctively throaty crooning style. Among the songs she introduced on screen was the 1944 Oscar-winner "You'll Never Know" which became permanently identified with her.

Though Faye's image on screen was ultimately one of warm appeal (she frequently played the wronged heroine faithful to the thoughtless hero till the happy fade-out), she started her career as a buxom blonde with a come-hither style.

When Rudy Vallee introduced her as his vocalist on a radio show in 1933, he told listeners: "For those of you wondering what Miss Faye looks like, I can best describe her as being like a young Mae West."

Born Alice Jeanne Leppert in New York City in 1915, she obtained a job with a dance troupe at the age of 14 (lying about her age) and two years later, having changed her surname to Faye, was in the chorus of George White's Scandals (1931) on Broadway. At a cast party its star Rudy Vallee heard Faye sing and was so impressed he hired her as vocalist on his radio show and ultimately became romantically involved with her - she was to be named by his wife in a stormy divorce case.

Signed by Fox to star in the film George White's Scandals (1934), Vallee persuaded the studio to cast Faye and, when Lilian Harvey walked out, to give Faye the star role. Offered a long-term contract by Fox, she stayed in Hollywood when Vallee returned to New York.

Though her early films were undistinguished - she confessed later that she learned to act in front of the camera - Faye's singing was always praised, and her recordings for Brunswick records sold well. In Every Night at Eight (1935), she introduced "Feel A Song Coming On" and in King of Burlesque (1936), "I'm Shooting High". This film (Faye's eighth) convinced the studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck that Faye deserved superior scripts and top-rate productions.

After supporting Shirley Temple in Poor Little Rich Girl (1936), Faye was given her best film to date, Sing Baby Sing (1936), in which she introduced another standard, "You Turned The Tables on Me", and appeared for the first time with her future husband Tony Martin.

She introduced one of her biggest hits, Mack Gordon and Harry Revel's "Goodnight, My Love" in Stowaway (1936). It was around this time that Jule Styne became a vocal coach at the studio. "Alice knew how to really sell a song," he said later. "She'd sing a song on the screen and the next morning it sold a million copies."

Though she was third-billed to Madeleine Carroll and Dick Powell in On The Avenue (1937), she had several new Irving Berlin tunes to sing, including the lovely ballad, "This Year's Kisses", and impressed critics with her portrayal of a jealous actress. In Wake Up and Live (1937), Faye introduced two Gordon-Revel standards: "There's A Lull in My Life" and "Never in a Million Years".

Faye teamed for the first of six times with Don Ameche in You Can't Have Everything (1937) and had one of her best roles as a would-be playwright. The title song (again by Gordon and Revel) was a big hit.

Zanuck had long planned to make an epic film centred on the great Chicago fire, and hoped to borrow Jean Harlow from MGM to star in it. When Harlow died, the director Henry King suggested Faye for the role, and Tyrone Power volunteered to test with her to prove to Zanuck that she was up to the part. With a budget of nearly $2m, In Old Chicago (1938) was a prestigious production that gained six Oscar nominations.

The three leads - Faye, Power and Don Ameche, were teamed again in an ambitious musical scanning three decades and built around the songs of Irving Berlin, Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938). Faye introduced a seductive Berlin ballad, "Now I Can Be Told" and sang such standards as the title song, "Blue Skies" and "Remember" (Berlin used to cite Fred Astaire and Faye as his favourite vocalists). The film became one of Faye's two personal favourites.

Power was her co-star for a final time in Rose Of Washington Square (1939), a film so closely based on the life of comedienne Fannie Brice that Brice sued the studio and won a large settlement.

Faye had begun feuding with Zanuck, who refused to allow her to do radio work or to renew her recording contract, and hospitalisation cost her the lead in a popular musical Down Argentine Way (1940), which made a star of her replacement, Betty Grable. Immediately, stories circulated that the two were now rivals and enemies ("Just Fox publicity," said Faye later. "The truth was we liked each other very much, became good friends and stayed good friends till the day