Although Marisa Merlini was never a star of the first rank, she held a firm place in the affection of Italian cinemagoers during the 1950s. No doubt in part this was due to her buxom sensuality, but also too because she was emblematic of the notion of the ideal Roman girl — quick-witted but warm-hearted — in the brief period when Italians cherished the illusion that they had returned to the idyll of pre-war days, before traditional values were swept away by the economic boom of the 1960s.

Merlini appeared in more than 100 films, largely in stock comic parts, but the role with which she was most associated was as the midwife Annarella in Luigi Comencini’s charming if rose-tinted view of rural Italy, Pane, amore e fantasia (1953).

The film was most notable for making the reputation of Gina Lollobrigida as the free-spirited farm girl who rejects the advances of an amorous policeman played by Vittorio De Sica. He then woos Merlini while giving her lifts on his motorised bicycle, unaware that she is hiding the secret of being an unmarried mother. Merlini brought great sympathy to her performance, which was so liked that she was compelled virtually to reprise it in another dozen or so films.

Marisa Merlini was born in Rome in 1923. She attended drama school as a girl but when still young she and her four brothers were abandoned by their father and grew up in poverty. At 17 she found work at a perfume counter in a department store.

There she was spotted by the wife of the Turin stage comedian Erminio Macaro, who would assemble for his revues a Benny Hill-style troupe of lovelies. A tall brunette with a pin-up’s figure, Merlini later recalled: “I was quite a tasty piece of work!” Macaro offered her 130 lire a day — what she made in a month as a shopgirl — and in 1941 she made her debut in Rome in Primavera di Donne, starring the soubrette Wanda Osiris.

When she went to see the wardrobe mistress, with ideas in mind of a glamorous sequined outfit, Merlini was surprised to be handed two fig leaves, one slightly larger than the other, with the injunction: “Put these in the right place”. Her ingenuous reply was: “Where’s that?”

The revue was a hit, and Merlini was chosen to be the official face of a popular weekly, expressing its idea of Italian femininity. The next year she made her screen debut in Stasera niente di nuovo, and then in 1943 appeared in another smash revue, Che ti sei messo in testa? This featured another young aspiring Roman actress, Anna Magnani, with whom she was to become close friends, and Totò, soon to become the king of Italian comedy. He and Merlini would go on to appear in seven films together, beginning with Totò cerca casa in 1948. Their most notable collaboration was L’imperatore di Capri (1949), also directed by Comencini, with the comic as the eccentric leader of island life and Merlini as a German baroness.

Thereafter, she was commonly cast as the foil to other funny men — pretty enough to be courted, but too bright to be the bombshell that topped the bill. Even so, she was much in demand, and in the early 1950s she was making half a dozen films a year.

These included the inevitable sequel to her early success, Pane, amore e gelosia (1954) and Tempo di villeggiatura (1956), in which her performance as a downcast tourist chatted up (again) by De Sica won her Italy’s Silver Ribbon as Best Supporting Actress. In 1957, she appeared opposite Marcello Mastroianni in Padri e figli, and in 1960 was Alberto Sordi’s wife in Il Vigile.

Arguably, the turning point of her career came with her decision to reject the lead in La Ciociara (Two Women, 1960), offered to her by its director De Sica. It was a part that might have converted her, like Magnani, into a serious actress, but Merlini did not want to be thought of as an older woman. The role was snapped up by Sophia Loren, whose performance won a Best Actress Oscar, the first for a non-English language film.

After I mostri (1963), directed by Dino Risi, the 40-year old Merlini endured several years without being offered a part. Rescue came, unexpectedly, from the London stage, when she was asked in 1970 to play Lady Hamilton’s Neapolitan governess in the first production of Terence Rattigan’s A Bequest to the Nation. Merlini accepted, despite not speaking English, and the play ran for a year at The Haymarket.

She returned in triumph to Italy, appearing thereafter on stage and increasingly on television, although she worked less after the mid-1980s, Her last screen role was in Pupi Avati’s La seconda notte delle nozze in 2005. To the end she was a fund of anecdotes about those with whom she had worked, and flirted.

Marisa Merlini, actress, was born on August 6, 1923. She died on July 27, 2008, aged 84