Time.news – Pearl, fish, swimming. The fate of is decidedly linked to water Carole André the French actress transplanted to Italy that disturbed so many male dreams at the time of ‘Sandokan’. Born under the sign of Pisces today the “Pearl of Labuan” turns seventy and celebrates them with a world record. A primacy that has nothing to do with cinema, a world that it has definitely left behind, to devote itself to the pools and not with a few strokes at low speed to keep fit as is recommended for those who have passed the “door”.
The former actress, an appreciated architect for years, is serious: at the regionals that took place in early March in Ostia he won the 50 breaststroke in his age category, the Masters 70setting the new world record with the time of 42”51. Not only that: she also had the satisfaction of conquering the Italian record in the 50m freestyle in 33”52. If it were a movie it would be Hitchcock’s ‘The Woman Who Lived Twice’.
Because Carole André who worked with Fellini, Risi, Visconti, Ferreri and who in the seventies, when she was just over twenty years old, Sergio Sollima dragged her along despite the actress’s lack of enthusiasm for the Asian trip (he had been the first to direct her when she was only 14 years old in the western ‘Face to face’) in India and Malaysia alongside Kabir Bedi for that television cult, no longer exists. Starting from her name: Carole Andrè (surname of her mother, also an actress, who lost shortly before Sandokan) has become Carole Smith (his real surname, that of his father). But she at the Due Ponti Sporting club in Rome, where she has been training for a few years and she always comes with a loose and comfortable look, she prefers to be called simply Smith, or affectionately “Smittina”. The references to Kabir Bedi, to Sandokan and the tigers of Mompracem they are not welcome, those who train with her know it, for Smittina there is only swimming.
Francesco Di Pippo, the personal trainer who follows her, tells Time.news that comparing her times now with the records of the 1970s, if Carole had started training as a youngster, “she would have gone to the Olympics”. The former actress makes up for lost time by training four times a week in the pool, twice in the gym, while Saturdays are dedicated to water aerobics and yoga. “She’s talented of her own and undergoes training in her twenties.”
Lying on the flat bench, the former Labuan pearl pulls on a 40-kilo barbell and the same with the squat, stuff that makes a weightlifter envious. “My mother at her age finds it hard to climb the stairs…” jokes Di Pippo.
The reason for the existential upside down was probably due to an identification with the Pearl of Labuan from which she felt imprisoned and which also held back her career. But life as a star also annoyed her (“the paparazzi chased me, I couldn’t leave the house, I had suddenly become like Madonna but deep down I hadn’t discovered the cure for cancer” she said years ago in an interview). And so he courageously changed his life: the last film, ‘Una vita non basta’ by Lelouch dates back to ’76, the last TV miniseries (‘Emergency room’) from ’90, followed by an acting parenthesis in the episodes of ‘A doctor in the family 5’ those in which Kabir Bedi was. It was 2007 and after that reunion with Sandokan Carole she changed her ways. Today she blows out seventy candles but there will be little room for celebrations: on Sunday the former Perla competes.