Franca Bettoia, an Italian actress born on May 14, 1936, in Rome, made her film debut in Un palco all'opera in 1955, directed by Siro Marcellini. The following year, she appeared in Los amantes del desierto, a Spanish-Italian desert epic starring Ricardo Montalban, Carmen Sevilla, and Gino Cervi.
Her subsequent roles included L'uomo di paglia in 1958, opposite Pietro Germi, and La main chaude in 1960, alongside Macha Méril and Jacques Charrier. She also appeared as a nun in Apocalisse sul Fiume Giallo, an anti-Communist propaganda film portraying the victory of Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army.
In 1961, Bettoia starred opposite Alan Ladd in Orazi e Curiazi, a sword and sandals adventure set in ancient Rome. She then co-starred with Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth, the first screen adaptation of Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, in 1964.
Bettoia's other notable roles include playing a princess in the adventure films Sandokan alla riscossa and Sandokan contro il leopardo di Sarawak, both released in 1964. In 1967, she appeared as Ugo Tognazzi's lover in the comedy Il fischio al naso, and the couple married in 1972.
They had a daughter, film director Maria Sole Tognazzi, and Bettoia acted in only three more films after Il fischio al naso. Her subsequent roles included Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare l'amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa?, a comedy starring Alberto Sordi and Bernard Blier, and Touche pas à la femme blanche, a drama starring Catherine Deneuve, Marcello Mastroianni, and Michel Piccoli.
Bettoia's last film was Teste rasate, a drama about skinheads, released in 1993, in which her son, Gianmarco Tognazzi, played the lead role.
