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An Italian actress whose career has invoked comparisons with the American Winona Ryder, Asia Argento has been acting in features since she was nine years old. The waif-like brunette has since played a variety of troubled youths and disturbed young women. While she was not considered attractive as a young girl when she began acting, Argento has matured into a beauty and was voted the most desirable actress in Italy in 1996. Though practically unknown in the USA despite nearly 20 films, she cracked the English-language market playing the street urchin Jared Harris hopes to reform in Michael Radford’s “B. Monkey” (1997).

Dark and sensuous in a heavy metal kind of way, Argento is the daughter of Italian director Dario Argento, whose work has often been in the horror genre. His daughter had one of her earliest screen roles in “Demoni 2: L’Incubo Ritorna” (1986) which was written by her father. The elder Argento also scripted “The Church” (1988), in which Asia Argento was cast as a young girl who encounters an unspeakable evil. She went on to play a sexually-abused daughter in “Close Friends” (1992). The next year, she made her English-language debut in “Trauma,” written and directed by her father, in which she was the daughter of Romanian immigrants who encounters a buzz-saw killer. While the film was not a box-office smash, it was popular among the elder Argento’s fans. Many American cineastes were not aware of Asia Argento, however, until “La Reine Margot/Queen Margot” (1994), in which she portrayed Charlotte of Sauve, the young baroness who gets poisoned.
In 1996, she was one of a cast of 120 in the experimental “Bits and Pieces,” which intertwined 30 stories about life in Rome. That same year, she was an angry and detached teenager who agrees to go on a journey with a retired academic in “Travelling Companion” and an undercover cop who suffers from “The Stendhal Syndrome”, in Dario Argento’s thriller about a policewoman tracking a serial killer. In 2002, Argento was cast in the summer blockbuster hit,”xXx”. After that, she went to France to film “La Sirene rouge”, a French feature directed by Olivier Megaton. She then appeared in Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days” (2005), a fictional rendition of troubled rock star Kurt Cobain’s final days before his self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head.

• Born:
  on 09/20/75 in Rome, Italy
• Job Titles:
  Actor, Director

Family

• Daughter: Anna Lou Argento. born on July 20, 2001
• Father: Dario Argento.
• Mother: Daria Nicolodi.
• Sister: Fiore Argento. older; born c. 1971

Significant Others

• Companion: Marco Castoldi. plays for the rock and roll Italian band Bluvertigo; father of Anna Lou; no longer together
• Companion: Rob Cohen. born c. 1950; reportedly dated when he directed her in “XXX” in 2001

Milestones

• 1985 Feature acting debut in “Sogni e Bisogni”
• 1986 Had early film role in “Demoni 2 - L’Incubo Ritorna/Demons 2 - The Nightmare Is Back”, scripted by Dario Argento
• 1993 First directed by her father in “Trauma”
• 1994 Co-starred as Charlotte of Sauve in “Queen Margot”
• 1994 Directorial debut making two short films: “Prosepettive” and “A ritroso”
• 1996 Appeared in the experimental “Bits and Pieces”
• 1996 Starred in “Stendhal Syndrome”, directed by her father
• 1998 Directed documentary on Abel Ferrara, “Abel/Asia which won an award at the Rome Film Festival
• 1999 Directed a four-minute short “Your Tongue on My Heart”; premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival
• 1999 Starred opposite Julian Sands in remake of “The Phantom of the Opera”, directed by her father
• 2000 Feature directorial debut with the English-language film “Scarlet Diva”; also starred; screened at Cannes
• 2001 Co-starred in “Love Bites”
• 2002 Co-starred in the summer’s action blockbuster “XXX”
• 2005 Cast in George A. Romero’s “Land of the Dead,” a thriller where the living dead have taken over the world
• 2005 Starred opposite Michael Pitt in Gus Van Sant’s “Last Days” loosely based on the life and career of musican Kurt Cobain
• Played title role in Michael Radford’s “B. Monkey” (filmed in 1996; released theatrically in the USA in 1999)
• Will portray Madame du Barry in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie-Antoinette” (lensed 2005)