Born August 14, 1928, in Rome, Italy. Her family heritage is Swiss. Her parents had a torrid marriage and finally called it quits after being married 50 years. I guess better late than never, eh?
Lina was a fitful child who was tossed out of 15 Roman Catholic schools. She and some of her friends began a modernist theater company in 1951. After that failed, miserably, she toured with a puppet company, scaring the shit out of kids with retelling of Franz Kafka stories with puppets.
Her film career began when she got hired on as an assistant director of Federico Fellini's 8½. She made her first film in 1963, a forgettable little thing called The Lizards. Fellini let her use his crew to film it and paid for a large part of the production costs. (You don't reckon ol' Freddy boy was playing Satyricon with little Lina after hours, do you?)
She's made several films since then, the most notable of which are The Seduction of Mimi (1972), Love and Anarchy (1973), Swept Away (1975), and Seven Beauties (1976). Swept Away is my personal favorite.
A lot of feminists dislike her immensely because they see her as a self-hating female. And to make it worse, she actually calls herself a feminist. The men in her films are usually sexists who are fairly stupid. The women are usually mega-bitches without souls.