She is more than just the daughter of the Italian horror great Dario Argento....

I am sure within film-making circles and the horror movie viewership community a lot of people know how "Deep Red" the name Dario Argento runs. From "Suspira" to countless other Italian horror film classics, Dario Argento has given birth to many visual masterpieces for horror audiences to enjoy over the course of decades that his body of work has produced. I wonder though, how many know of the one underlying masterpiece he brought to the film industry...his very own daughter actress/director Asia Argento?

Horror has some new blood....

Asia Argento was born in Rome, Italy on September 20, 1975 to horror director Dario Argento and long-term partner Daria Nicolodi who has also starred in many of Dario's films. Asia came to this world as Asia Aria Maria Vittoria Rossa Argento but close friends and family have been know to call her by the nickname "AZ." When Asia Argento was born in Rome, the city registry office refused to acknowledge Asia as an appropriate name, and instead officially inscribed her as Aria (a name accepted by the city registry).

Asia has mentioned in interviews that she does not have a close relationship with her father. She has mentioned that he was absent when she was a child. She has also mentioned that she did not have a happy childhood. Regarding her relationship with her father and her reason for acting, she has stated that:

"I never acted out of ambition; I acted to gain my father's attention. It took a long time for him to notice me – I started when I was nine, and he only cast me when I was 16. And he only became my father when he was my director. I always thought it was sick to choose looking at yourself on a big screen as your job. There has to be something crooked in your mind to want to be loved by everybody. It's like being a prostitute, to share that intimacy with all those people." — Asia Argento, Filmmaker Magazine

Asia Argento had a small part in Demons 2, a 1986 film written and produced by her father, at the age of 10, as well as its unofficial sequel, La Chiesa (The Church), when she was 14, and Trauma (1993), when she was 18. She received the David di Donatello (Italy's version of the Academy Award) for Best Actress in 1994 for her performance in Perdiamoci di vista, and again in 1996 for Compagna di viaggio, which also earned her a Grolla d'oro award. In 1998, Argento began appearing in English-language movies, such as B. Monkey and New Rose Hotel.

Argento has proven her ability to work in multiple languages, adding French, with a role as Charlotte de Sauve in 1994's La Reine Margot. That same year, she made her first foray into directing, calling the shots behind the short films Prospettive and A ritroso. In 1996, she directed a documentary on her father, and in 1998 a second one on Abel Ferrara, which won her the Rome Film Festival Award.

Argento directed and wrote her first movie, Scarlet Diva (2000), which her father co-produced. In 2002, she portrayed Russian undercover spy Yelena in the action film xXx alongside Vin Diesel. In 2004, she directed her second film The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, based on a book by JT LeRoy, the pen name of Laura Albert, this time in the United States.

In 2005, Asia Argento once again landed on the big screen with George A Romero's 4th installment in his "Of The Dead" zombie series epic Land of the Dead. Asia played Slack, a tough heroine caught up in the middle of the zombie apocalypse with a crew of few. Asia is very endeared to the horror film community for this character and probably most noted in the mainstream for this moment in her career as Slack in Romero's Land of the Dead.

So what has Asia been up to over the years since?

Asia is know to suffer from agoraphobia, a condition that recluses a sufferer to mainly stick to ones home dwelling. She has said in an interview once:

"I was afraid to go out of my apartment for a long time, I could only go out to work"

Though she suffers from this, Asia is know to be the fighting spirit type and still goes out very actively and works in film still to this very day. Asia is finishing up a project called "The Executrix" which should release come October 2017. This film is about a discontented New York family woman called unexpectedly to Tuscany to execute her estranged mother's Will. There, she deciphers visions of her forgotten childhood and confronts a spectral "Lady in Red," whose dark secret unlocks a terrifying destiny. So as we can see, she still holds true to the horror roots patterned throughout this amazing scream queens career.

Asia Argento, is inspirational and down to earth from the research I have come across while writing this article. Asia is probably one of the more underrated actresses of horror due to such a huge light on her father's career. She has not only given horror some very serious heart but also so much skill to some dramatic roles in her career. Recommending her work to anyone is highly valuable and something not to be missed.

~Where Horrors Dwell

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SCREAM QUEEN SERIES #1

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some info on this post was released under CC-BY-SA from Wikipedia and you can find their full page here where we gathered some key info for this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia_Argento