Gitte "Brigitte" Nielsen (15 July 1963 in Rødovre) is a Danish model, actress and singer, she appeared as Ludmilla Drago, the sadistically Soviet-patriotic wife of Soviet boxer Ivan Drago in the Rocky IV film. Danish-born actress, model, musician and reality television personality who began her career modelling for Greg Gorman and Helmut Newton and several years later acted in the 1985 films Red Sonja and Rocky IV. She is also known for her marriage to Sylvester Stallone, with whom she starred in the 1986 film Cobra. She played Karla Fry on Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), co-starring Eddie Murphy, and played the Dark Witch in the Italian TV Series Cave of the Golden Rose between 1992-1996. She appeared also in Michael Jackson's "Liberian Girl" music video.
She reprised her role as Ludmilla Drago in 2018's Creed II.
Life and private[]
She was born in Rødovre in 1963 as the daughter of the engineer Svend Nielsen († 1999) and the librarian Hanne Nielsen.
At the beginning of her career as a model, she met her first husband, the musician Kasper Winding, with whom she was married from 1983 to 1984 and has a son (* 1984). Her highly publicized marriage to actor Sylvester Stallone lasted from December 1985 to July 1987. After him, she was in a relationship with American football star Mark Gastineau in 1988, with whom she had a son in 1989. Nielsen then went to the altar three more times: from 1990 to 1992 she was married to the photographer Sebastian Copeland, Orlando Bloom's cousin, from 1993 to 2005 to the former racing driver Raoul Meyer-Ortolani, with whom she has two sons (* 1993 and 1995).[25] Since July 2006 she has been married to the bartender Mattia Dessi, who is 15 years her junior.[26] According to press reports, the marriage took two attempts: the first vow in February 2006 turned out to be invalid because Nielsen was still married to Raoul Meyer-Ortolani. In June 2018, at the age of 54, she had a daughter with Dessi.
In addition, Nielsen had other relationships that were widely publicized in the media: During the filming of Red Sonja, she had a brief liaison with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Her affair with Public Enemy rapper Flavor Flav was part of his reality show Flavor of Love in 2006.
In 2008, Nielsen publicly admitted to suffering from alcoholism and took part in the reality show Celebrity Rehab. In 2012 she suffered a relapse. In addition to Danish, Nielsen also speaks English, Italian, German, Swedish and Norwegian.