Marina Pierro (born 9 October 1956, or 1960) is an Italian actress, model, writer, and film director, who is best known for her artistic relationship with Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk (1923-2006). Pierro and Borowczyk's collaboration lasted approximately ten years and comprised five completed films and one foray into episodic television.
Pierro has been described as an "erotic icon of auteur cinema" and she has referred to herself as Walerian Borowczyk's muse. Michael Brooke, a writer specializing in European cinema and an enthusiast of Borowczyk's films, has suggested the importance of Pierro in evaluating the director's work:
It's hard to ignore, not least because it's a matter of undeniable fact, that all [Borowczyk's] films fundamentally represent the viewpoint of a middle-aged heterosexual man. You can certainly defend them against charges of misogyny by pointing out that the female characters in his later films are generally far stronger-willed and far more in control of their sexual pleasure than was the norm in 1970s cinema, something that became especially clear when [Borowczyk] began a decade-plus collaboration with the Italian actress Marina Pierro.
For Redeemer magazine in 1993, Peter Tombs wrote,
Marina Pierro is an extraordinary actress who combines a sullen sensuality with an ethereal, almost nervous intensity. Her white skin, jet black hair and hypnotic eyes have made her an unforgettable presence in five films from the Polish born master of erotic cinema, Walerian Borowczyk. Yet to the public at large she remains unknown.
Of her relationship with Borowczyk, Pierro herself stated,
...above all we were united - we discovered it by working together – by the same visual conception of cinema, in which the fantastic and the poetic, the divine and the diabolical, and the "strange fascination" coexist.
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