Milestones Apr. 4, 1994

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DIED. GIULIETTA MASINA, 73, international film star; of cancer; in Rome. The wife of Federico Fellini, who died in October, Masina proved to be the most affecting interpreter of her husband's work. The round-faced, expressive-eyed actress got her first break in a 1942 radio play written by Fellini, who married her the next year. She went on to star in a string of Fellini masterpieces -- most famously La Strada (1954), the Oscar-winning movie that featured Masina as the waifish victim of circus strongman Anthony Quinn, and Nights of Cabiria (1957), arguably the best work of both Masina and Fellini -- her role as a prostitute betrayed by fate and love melded a Chaplinesque sense of physical comedy with a profoundly moving portrait of the human capacity to triumph simply by enduring. Other works with her husband included Juliet of the Spirits (1965) and her 1985 cinema swan song Ginger and Fred, which co-starred Marcello Mastroianni.