Buy, Margherita

(1962-)

   Actress. One of the most prominent of the young actresses to emerge in the New Italian Cinema of the 1990s, Buy studied at the Academia d'Arte Drammatica before beginning to work in television and on the stage. After her appearance in Nino Bizarri's La seconda notte (The Second Night, 1988) and Daniele Luchetti's Domani accadra (It's Happening Tomorrow, 1988), her acting talents really came to the fore in La stazione (The Station, 1990), the first film she made with her sometime husband, actor-director Sergio Rubini, and for which she received both the David di Donatello and the Nastro d'argento for best actress in a leading role. She subsequently starred in a number of films directed by Giuseppe Piccioni including Chiedi la luna (Ask for the Moon, 1991), Cuori al verde (Penniless Hearts, 1996), and Fuori dal mondo (Not of This World, 1999), in the last playing the role of a young nun in an interpretation that brought her a second David. Although competent enough in erotic and comic roles, as in Rubini's Prestazione straordinaria (Working Overtime, 1994), Buy's strengths have continued to emerge more clearly in the difficult dramatic characterizations that she has taken on, such as that of the distraught wife forced to come to terms not only with her husband's death in a car accident but also his previous homosexual double life in Ferzan Ozpetek's La fate ignoranti (The Ignorant Fairies, 2000). In more recent times she has been very convincing as the timid and subdued mother in Paolo Virzi's highly acclaimed coming-of-age comedy Caterina va in citta (Caterina in the Big City, 2003) and the psychologically scarred and abandoned wife and mother in Roberto Faenza's I giorni dell'abbandono (The Days of Abandonment, 2005).