Erika Blanc

Erika Blanc — Biography

Erika Blanc, born Enrica Bianchi Colombatto, has been a recognisable face of Italian genre cinema since the mid-1960s. She is remembered for cult European horror films and for playing the first fictional Emmanuelle in Io, Emmanuelle (1969). Working on screen and stage, she drew fresh attention in the 2000s through the cinema of Ferzan Özpetek and returned to the screen in 2020 with Guests in a Villa.

Her career began in 1965. Born in Gargnano, she was seen in her early years in gothic horror (La vendetta di Lady Morgan, 1965), spy films (Agent 077: Mission Bloody Mary) and European crime thrillers (Kommissar X - Drei blaue Panther). In the second half of the 1960s spaghetti westerns (Django Shoots First, Halleluja for Django, One Thousand Dollars on the Black) made her better known. Her standout horror titles were The Third Eye, Kill, Baby, Kill, So Sweet... So Perverse, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave, The Red Headed Corpse and Mark of the Devil Part II. In the 1970s she also appeared in films such as Long Arm of the Godfather, Tony Arzenta, The Stranger and the Gunfighter and Eye of the Cat, followed by La portiera nuda (1976) and Io tigro, tu tigri, egli tigra (1978).

Later she played Antonia's mother in Özpetek's Cahil Periler (2001) and the alcohol-addicted Maria Clara in his Sacred Heart (2005), roles described as small but intense. In Adored (2003) she played the grandmother.