Betti made her film debut in
Federico Fellini's
La Dolce Vita (1960). In 1963, she became a close friend of the poet and movie director
Pier Paolo Pasolini. Under his direction, she proved a wonderful talent and played in seven of his films, including
La ricotta (1963),
Teorema (
Theorem, 1968), his 1972 version of
The Canterbury Tales, in which she played the Wife of Bath, and his controversial
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). In 1976, Betti portrayed Regina, a cruel and eroto-maniacal
fascist in
Bernardo Bertolucci's
Novecento (
1900). She also played Miss Blandish in his
Last Tango in Paris (1972), though her single scene was deleted. In 1973, she dubbed the voice of the Devil for the Italian version of
William Friedkin's
The Exorcist. (1965) From the 1960s, Betti dedicated much of her time to
literature and
politics. She became the muse for a number of leading political and literary figures in Italy and came to personify the revolutionary and
Marxist era of 1970s Italy. In 2001, she made a documentary about Pasolini,
Pier Paolo Pasolini e la ragione di un sogno. She also donated her papers related to their long friendship along with more than 1000 volumes and many documents connected to Pasolini to the archives of the
Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, thus creating the
Centro Studi Archivio Pier Paolo Pasolini. This
Centro, strongly wanted by Betti, owns also thousands of photograph and all the works of Pasolini: poetry, literature, cinema and journalism. After her death in 2004, her brother Sergio Trombetti has donated all the personal documents of her career to the
Centro that has absorbed them under the name
Fondo Laura Betti. ==Selected filmography==