Veteran Italian cinema diva Lucia Bose dead at 89

Lucia Bose, a former Miss Italy winner and one of the first divas of postwar Italian cinema, died Monday aged 89, her family has announced.

"Dear friends ... I inform you that my mother Lucia Bose has just passed away. She is already in the best of places," her son Miguel, a well-known pop star in Spain and Italy, wrote on Twitter.

Bose worked with several great Italian directors, starring for example in Michelangelo Antonioni's Story of a Love Affair, from 1950, and Federico Fellini's Satyricon, from 1969.

She got into showbusiness as a teenager after director Luchino Visconti spotted her working in a pastry shop in Milan and told her she had a face made for cinema.

Bose, whose real name was Lucia Borloni, was born in Milan on January 28, 1931. She moved to Spain, where she died, after marrying top Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin, whom she divorced in 1967.