Clodagh Finn: It’s about time we celebrated our elder female icons

Italian film star and politician Gina Lollobrigida died in Rome aged 95.

I’M compiling a new list of female ‘icons’. The late, great cinematic ‘icon’ Gina Lollobrigida will be on it, not because she was, to quote that reductive phrase used in several recent obituaries, an “Italian bombshell” but because she was powerful and active and kickass well into her 90s.

You wouldn’t necessarily know that from the recent coverage of her passing which, almost without exception, featured photographs of her in her glamorous heyday.