Who is the actress who plays diva Mara Cecova in OPERA? It is common knowledge that Vanessa Redgrave was supposed to have played the role but demanded too much money and Argento decided to shoot the opening sequence from her point of view. Yet, in the climactic opera sequence, we see her twice in an opera box partially obscured by her companion in the foreground.

Given that the director's girlfriend was played by Argento's then-girlfriend Antonella Vitale, a cop by Argento's second unit director Michele Soavi, the manager's assistant Soavi's wife Barbara Cupisti, and the raven trainer Maurizio by animal trainer Maurizio Garrone, is the actress playing the part of Mara Cecova in the two brief shots simply an extra or someone somehow related to Argento's body of work?

I'm not sure who the actress is but I'm somewhat surprised that Argento didn't cast Daria Nicolodi in that role. :D

Here's an interesting note. According to imdb.com, the actor who played the "Diva's assistant" also played one of the punks in DEMONS.

The "Diva's Assistant" in OPERA looks like one of the two male leads in DEMONS (obviously the one who is not Urbano Barberini, since he plays the inspector). Could this be the "punk" they refer to?

The IMDB also claims that Fiore Argento played the receptionist at the Faraday Clinic in TRAUMA, but I've never seen this varified anywhere, and the voice on my rough cut tape (which does not have any of the ADR from the final mix of TRAUMA) is the exact same voice as heard in the final cut of the film- i.e., no accent.

Vincent

The punk's name is Baby Pig. I haven't seen the film in about three years. I remember that there are two guys and a girl, unless there were some other punks in the audience before they arrived.

I've seen several sources list Fiore Argento as the clinic receptionist in TRAUMA, including Profondo Argento by Alan Jones. She certainly looks enough like Fiore for it to be likely, and regarding the voice, I stand by my assertion that it is dubbed. I haven't seen the rough cut, but in the final version the voice has that "dislocated" feel, both in terms of sound quality and in not perfectly fitting the lip movements, which leads me to believe that it was dubbed.

Michael:

My problem with your assertion that "Fiore Argento's" voice in TRAUMA is dubbed is 1. that the vocal performance is EXACTLY THE SAME as it is in the rough cut tape, which has NONE OF THE OTHER 'TRAUMA' ADR in it (and there ARE several lines of ADR in TRAUMA's final mix, such as Aura's final lines of dialogue which are a completely different recording and very muffled on the rough cut tape version, plus her saying "She put the needle in my arm" earlier, and David's lines when he runs into the lake looking for Aura, and some others...), and 2. that viewed on my video projector on a 7-8 foot wide screen, the voice matches the lip movements perfectly, so I don't quite know what you're talking about when you claim that her lip movements don't match. In fact, the only line in the final English mix of TRAUMA that DOESN'T match in terms of lip-sync is Aura's 2nd-to-last line of dialogue (which was ADRed), when she says, "Commit the murders!", which is VERY out-of-sync in the final mix. On the rough-cut tape, the on-set recording is in-sync but very muffled (Asia must've been wearing a lapel mic hidden in her clothing during this scene, and her clothing probably affected the recording to make iy muffled and quite low), whereas the final mix is very audible, but obviosuly very OUT of sync in every version of TRAUMA in English that I've seen.

On the other hand, the couple lines of the receptionist's dialogue is not only in sync, but it's exactly the same in both the rough-cut tape and the final English-language mix. It simply doesn't make sense that they'd have re-recorded dialogue for the receptionist scene and the receptionist scene alone handy when making the rough-cut of TRAUMA.

Vincent