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Asia Anna Maria Argento (born 20 September, 1975, Rome) is an Italian television and film actress and director. In Rome, the city's register office refused to acknowledge Asia as an appropriate name, and instead officially inscribed her as Aria Argento. Despite this, she uses the name Asia Argento professionally. Asia is pronounced in Italian.

Background

Family and early life

Her mother is the actress Daria Nicolodi and her father is Dario Argento, an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter well known for his work in the Italian giallo genre, and for his influence on modern horror and slasher movies. Her first child, a girl, was born on 20 June, 2001. Italian rock and roll musician Marco Castoldi (lead singer of Bluvertigo), also known as Morgan, is the father.

Career

Asia Argento was directed by her father Dario Argento in one of her first works, Trauma (1993), when she was 16. During this film she also had her first nude scene. She received the David di Donatello (Italy's version of Hollywood's Academy Award) for Best Actress in 1994 for her performance in Perdiamoci di vista!, and again in 1996 for Compagna di viaggio, which also earned her a Grolla d'oro award. In 1998, Argento began appearing in the American movies, such as B. Monkey and New Rose Hotel, alongside Christopher Walken.

Argento has also proven her ability to work in multiple languages, adding French to the list of languages in which she has performed, with a role in 1994's La Reine Margot. That same year, she made her first foray into directing, calling the shots behind the short films Prospettive and A ritroso. In 1996, she directed a documentary on her father, and in 1998 a second one on Abel Ferrara, which won her the Rome Film Festival Award. She directed and wrote her first movie called Scarlet Diva (2000) and four years later she directed her second movie, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004), this time in the United States.

In addition to her accomplishments in the world of film, Argento has written a number of stories for magazines such as Dynamo and L'Espresso, while her first novel, titled I Love You Kirk, was published in Italy in 1999. She has modeled for and endorses the brand Miss Sixty. The band Hondo Maclean from South Wales, gained Argento's interest when they wrote a track named after her. She liked the track so much she sent them pictures which they used as the cover of their 2004 EP Chasing Angels.

From the 17th to the 25th of October 2006, Argento contributed a video diary to Nick Knight's website, SHOWstudio. The title of the 54 entries/episodes was "Don't Bother To Knock" and detailed Argento's daily life with three entries (noon, 6 p.m. and midnight) posted every day. The content of the entries were partially controlled by a discussion forum and together formed a cohesive whole, a sort of "mini-movie" anyone could view for free. In the clips Argento discusses topics such as freaks, her father, Fellini and her sexuality as well as journaling a pregnancy, a new love interest and her unraveling psyche. All of these issues come to a head before Argento's final revelations and good-byes. The last visual of the diary is a digitally manipulated portrait of Argento taken by Knight, slowly burning away.

Controversy

While Argento is certainly a celebrity in her native country, the coverage that the Italian press showers on her is not always favorable. She has drawn criticism for her openness toward drug use and posing nude, as well as the deeply erotic scenes she has performed in, particularly those that her father has filmed. In 2001, a great deal of attention was drawn to an alleged hit-and-run that Argento was involved in, and her position in this incident wasn't helped by the fact that a bottle of absinthe was found in her car (the liquor was to be used as a prop in a music video that Argento was directing).

Tattoos

An Eye

"It's on my shoulder, I got it on my first trip to Amsterdam when I was 14. I was so high on hash, and while I knew that I wanted an eye, I really didn't know how I wanted it. The guy at the tattoo place felt sorry for me, and anyway he did it."

Two Snakes and a Sun

"It's over my ass. I did the two snakes in Minneapolis when I was shooting Trauma. I was 16. The sun that's in between, I did that in Amsterdam (again) when I was 17. The snakes were taken from a Medusa statue that I saw in Rome, and they were intertwined around her waist. And the sun... I dunno, I drew it... but all these tattoos, I have to say, I would have a million symbolic reasons that were very true at the time I was having the tattoo, very romantic in a way. You could say: "I got this tattoo for a reason" but not really, I really liked those drawings, and this is the bottom line."

An Angel

"It's taken from a painting by the Belgian painter Delvaux... But she's not an angel, I added the wings. And I did it there (rising from her pubis mound) not for some sexual iconography of a flying pussy, but more to hide it from my father, who was not so happy about me having all these tattoos. I remember when I finally showed it to him, like three years after, 'cos I managed to hide it for a couple of years, he said that now I could fulfil my dream and work in the circus as the tattooed wonder"

Anna

"The last one I got, and maybe it's the only one I got for a reason. It's my sister's name (the deceased Anna - who Scarlet Diva is dedicated to) on my ribs. Because I remembered this line by Blixa Bargeld: "I don't know who has cut you off my ribs" - as of Eve for Adam. it looks like a jail tattoo, something very dirty"

23

"its located in her neck"

Selected filmography

• The Third Mother (2006)
• Transylvania (2006)
• Coin Locker Babies (2006)
• Marie-Antoinette (2006)
• Sean Lennon's Friendly Fire (2006)
• Land of the Dead (2005)
• Cindy: The Doll Is Mine (2005)
• Last Days (2005)
• The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (2004)
• The Keeper (2004)
• (s)AINT The Marilyn Manson music video (2003)
• xXx (2002)
• Scarlet Diva (2000)
• New Rose Hotel (1998)
• The Stendhal Syndrome (1996)
• La Reine Margot (1994)
• Trauma (1993)
• Palombella Rossa (1988)
• Demoni 2 (1986)

External links

• Asia Argento at IMDb
• Asia Argento Official site
• Asia Argento Interview about Land of the Dead
• Dark Dreams: the Films of Dario Argento
• Ode to Azia: Authorized Asia Argento fansite
• Don't Bother To Knock: A Video Diary by Asia Argento
• Asia Argento interview about XXX, and her work as a director

• 1975 births
• Female film directors
• Italian film actors
• Italian television actors
• Italian film directors
• Italian screenwriters
• Living people
• Natives of Rome
• Voice actors
• People of Brazilian descent