Lina Wertmüller

Lina Wertmüller is presented in Andy Warhol’s diary through two social appearances in January 1978, both marked by her standing as a guest of honor. The entries link her film career to the New York social world around Warhol and record a brief, physical encounter that makes her presence unusually immediate: at a dinner, she coughed on him and said she was recovering from the flu.

Identity and Film Work

Wertmüller appears as a filmmaker whose work was being introduced to New York audiences. At the end of January, the diary notes that her film A Night of Full Rain, with Giancarlo Giannini and Candy Bergen, was opening. The entry places the film’s release alongside the dinner party’s gathering of artists, performers, and other prominent guests, showing how her professional news circulated within the same social settings as her public appearances.

Her connection to Warhol’s filmmaking also ran through her husband, Enrico Job. The diary identifies him as the production designer on Warhol’s Frankenstein and Dracula, giving the couple a direct professional link to the diarist’s own work as well as a place in the evening’s social company.

January 1978 Appearances

On January 17, Warhol attended a dinner for Wertmüller at the Italian embassy, hosted by the Vincis. The encounter was brief but concrete: she coughed on him, then explained that she was just getting over the flu. The diary records the moment without elaborating on it, leaving Wertmüller’s own words and the interruption of illness as the defining details of their contact that evening.

On January 28, Warhol picked up Bianca and went to a party at the Dakota for Susan and Gil Shiva. Wertmüller and Job were again guests of honor. This second appearance coincided with the opening of A Night of Full Rain, and the gathering brought her film work, her husband’s production-design work, and the city’s social life into the same scene.

Place in the Diary

Wertmüller is not given an extended personal portrait in these entries; she emerges through repeated public recognition and a handful of carefully recorded particulars. The diary first places her at an embassy dinner and later at a Dakota party, each time as a guest of honor. Between those appearances, it supplies a compact account of her professional context: a film opening and Job’s work on Warhol’s movies.

That limited treatment makes the entries valuable less as a biography than as a record of how artistic careers met in Warhol’s social world. Wertmüller’s film and Job’s design work appear beside the ordinary logistics of parties and encounters, while the cough at the embassy dinner interrupts the formality with an unguarded moment of contact.