Pier Angeli mystery death

Pier Angeli was a sweetheart. James Dean loved her. Kirk Douglas loved her, as did singer Vic Damone, Italian film composer Armando Trovajoli, and Paul Newman.

“The most beautiful Italian actress of the century,” Paul Newman said. “She was an extremely complex and gifted woman.”

In the 1956 boxing movie Somebody Up There Likes Me she played the wife of Paul Newman’s real-life character, middleweight champion Rocky Graziano.

The role of Rocky was originally intended for Pier’s former lover James Dean.

But just before the movie began shooting, James Dean was killed in a car crash — on September 30, 1955.

Pier Angeli said James Dean was the love of her life: “He is the only man I ever loved deeply as a woman should love a man.”

Her friends said she never got over his death, and she had nightmares about him up until her own death.

On September 10, 1971, Pier Angeli was found dead of a barbiturate overdose at her home in Beverly Hills.

That day, her doctor had given her an injection of the powerful drug Compazine to calm her down because she had not been able to sleep.

Her death was initially believed to be caused by a fatal allergic reaction to the drug but an autopsy did not back that up. No one knows if her death was an accident, or suicide.

Pier Angeli was 39.

🔝