“Maria Carmi (Norina Gilli 1880-1957). Married to German playwright Karl Vollmöller, Maria Carmi decided to become an actress on Max Reinhardt’s advice and attended his acting school. Reinhardt offered her an exceptional debut with Das Mirakel (1911), a stage pantomime which had had its première in London the previous year and was adapted for the screen in 1912. Again with Reinhardt, Carmi appeared in Eine venezianische Nacht (1912) ‘a tasty mix of farce, fantasy and commedia dell’arte held together by northern romanticism’ (Savio).
After returning to Italy, Cines signed her up for Retaggio d’odio (1914), a bold attempt to make a psychological film, directed by Nino Oxilia. After two features, including La mia vita per la tua (1914), written by Matilde Serao, the actress appeared with Giovanni Grasso and Balestrieri in the legendary Sperduti nel buio and then in Teresa Raquin with great tragic actress Giacinta Pezzana. At the onset of the war she followed her husband in Germany where she stayed till the end of the conflict; she became extremely popular in German cinema thanks to around twenty films which have all been lost, except for Rächende Liebe (1917), fortunately rediscovered in the Moscow film archive.
Haughty, with classic features, a severe expression sweetened by soft hues, Maria Carmi was the ideal actress for melodramas tailored to the taste of high and middle-class audiences, continuing on the screen the tradition of the nineteenth-century prima donna, who was appreciated not only for her acting but also for her essentially erotic beauty and charm.
In 1920 Carmi divorced Vollmöller and came back to Italy, where her German films, after being thoroughly de-Germanized, were distributed as Italian features in order to bypass the boycott against German products. Already five or six years old, they were quite successful, while ferocious criticism and high-voiced dissension were meted out for Forse che sì, forse che no (1922), based on D’Annunzio’s novel, and directed by French Gaston Ravel.
Disappointed and embittered, Carmi left the cinema and returned to the stage: for Bragaglia’s Teatro degli Indipendenti she played Marinetti, Pirandello and other playwrights. Called by Reinhardt for a rerun of The Miracle in America, the actress married Georgian Prince Matchabelli in New York, opened an acting school and later took up esoteric studies”. (Vittorio Martinelli)
“When Maria Carmi moves to kiss every pore on her body becomes a willing pair of lips, when she exults, the joy flickers like a flame emitting white heat from from her fingertips. When she is in despair, her agony involves every nerve in her body as though trapped painfully in a snare. I have never seen a inprayer embrace the image of the Virgin with more fervor. The stone seemed to dissolve under the the plea of her hands. The torrential eruptions burst into transalpine incandescence. Her sharp, aristocratic profile splits the whole of an emotion in its most mysterious details more than a word ever could. Her hands have been elusively lifted from a fairy tale, they live a life of their own. These hands that know no limits, tapered and able, at times become the terrifying claws of a predator and immediately afterwards they invoke with the desire of a tender nun. They are the heralders of maxium beatitude: they place themselves in the same way upon the nape of their lover’s neck as on lethal daggers. When these ten slimnesses of Carrara’s marble, sculpted into life, caress a rose or pass almost involuntarily through the curly locks of her man’s hair there is no need to look the actress in the face, as her hands would betray everything: the snare and the love, the cruelty and the devout adoration. Maria Carmi’s hands are a savage dream”. (Manfred Georg, Die Hände der Maria Carmi, 1916 now in Fritz Güttinger, Kein Tag ohne Kino, 1984)