The actress Monica Vitti, who has died at the age of 90, was one of the shining stars of post-war Italian cinema, not least for her professional and personal association with the modernist director Michelangelo Antonioni. Together, they made several films in the early Sixties including L’Avventura (The Adventure), L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) and Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert), which are today regarded as classics of Italian radical filmmaking, all of which dealt with philosophical themes of abstraction and alienation. 

It was unsurprising, then, for her English-language debut, Vitti chose to work with the American filmmaker Joseph Losey, who had been blacklisted from his earlier Hollywood career over his former membership of the Communist Party. Losey had moved to Britain in the Fifties and had since won critical plaudits with his Harold Pinter-scripted 1963 adaptation of Robin Maugham’s novel The Servant, which had received a Bafta award for its star Dirk Bogarde’s brilliant performance as the Machiavellian valet Hugo Barrett. 

Therefore, a new collaboration between Pinter, Losey, Bogarde and Vitti was enough to thrill even the most jaded of cinephiles. But the result was not entirely what anyone was expecting, including those who were involved in it. 

The comic strip writer Peter O’Donnell had built a significant reputation by 1965 as the creator of the character Modesty Blaise, a female superspy in the employment of a shadowy secret agency known only as The Network, aided by her Cockney sidekick (but, crucially, never love interest) Willie Garvin: a character that O’Donnell explicitly based on the then-rising star Michael Caine. The writer suggested that he would like Caine to play Garvin in any film adaptation of the work. 

The Modesty Blaise character which first appeared in the Evening Standard, was groundbreaking in several key regards, not least in being a strong-willed and independent woman who was anything but the decorative damsel in distress that the female leads were in the rival James Bond series; as O’Donnell said: “[Modesty] doesn’t just kick people in the head…she’s very tender and vulnerable.”