Perhaps she si best known for her striptease scene in Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960). Nadia Gray (sometimes Nada Grey) was born Nadia Kujnir-Herescu in Bucuresti, România in 1923. She came from an old Jewish family. Her father was a Russian refugee and her mother was Bessarabian. In 1946 she married the aristocrat Constantin Cantacuzino, a Romanian aviator and WWI fighter ace. They had met when she was a passenger on a commercial air flight at which he was the pilot. One of the engines had caught fire and Cantacuzino was forced to do an emergency landing. At the time, Gray had just started a career as a theatre actress. In 1947, the couple left Romania for Paris to escape the Communist regime after World War I. Her film debut was in the French-Austrian coproduction L'Inconnu d'un soir/ Strangers on a night (1948, Hervé Bromberger) with Claude Dauphin. She played the leading role as a young waitress who yearns to be a star. Nadia enjoyed with her hus- band a cosmopolitan jet-set life and meanwhile she appeared on stage and in films. Early film roles that led to European stardom included her countess in Monseigneur/ Monsignor (1949, Roger Richebe) opposite Bernard Blier, a woman in love with a master-safecracker (Guy Rolfe) in The Spider and the Fly (1949, Robert Hamer), and an opera diva in the Technicolor biopic Puccini (1953, Carmine Gallone) featuring Gabriele Ferzetti as the composer.