Born on September 30, 1968, Bellucci grew up in the small Italian village of Citta di Castello, where her father owned a trucking company. At 18, she enrolled at the University of Perugia with plans to study law.

To pay her tuition, Bellucci started modeling. Two years later, she dropped out of school to relocate to Milan, where she signed with Elite Model Management. Besides strutting the cat walk in fashion shows, Bellucci appeared in international advertising campaigns for designers such as Dolce & Gabbana.

With her modeling career in full swing, she began to take acting classes and made her screen debut in the television film Vita Coi Figli (Life With the Sons) in 1990.

Critics describe her as the perfect mix of naturally cute and 𝓈ℯ𝓍y. Pouty lips, soft facial features, and big piercing eyes. She’s on the taller side but not supermodel tall, which makes her stand out but not too much.

Her body is voluptuous but her style is elegant. She could have easily played with 𝓈ℯ𝓍 appeal more but she is always seen as classy and elegant. Her image is also more natural and she never tried to appear perfect.

Her body is soft and sensual, like Sophia Loren’s pasta and wine body, and not super skinny and like the carefully crafted and edited Instagram body.

After acting in several Italian features, Bellucci graced American screens for the first time as one of Dracula’s (Gary Oldman) brides in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), which also starred Keanu Reaves and Winona Ryder.

She subsequently returned to Italy to appear in the heist film I Mitici (The Heroes) (1994) and the 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥ren’s movie Palla di Neve (Snowball) (1995).

As time passed, Bellucci grew increasingly frustrated with the failure of Italy’s film industry to promote its projects abroad. She starred opposite Ben Kingsley and Dominique Sanda in the American television movie Joseph (1995), before looking for work in French films.

Bellucci made her French-language debut in 1996’s award-winning romance L’Appartement (The Apartment). She earned a César nomination for her performance in the role, as well as began dating her co-star, French actor Vincent Cassel.

The couple (who married a few years later) re-teamed onscreen immediately, portraying comically troubled lovers in the gender-bending romance Come Mi Vuoi (As You Want Me) (1996) and murderous bank robbers in Jan Kounen’s infamous thriller Dobermann (1997).