MILAN, Nov 22 — Four steps separated Ornella Vanoni from the life she craved: the four steps leading up to the stage of Milan’s Piccolo Teatro.

“I twisted my nerves, I pulled my hair,” she recalled in her memoir, Vincente o perdente (Winner or Loser), of the fear that gripped her in the mid-1950s. “I wanted to be there, up front, but those few metres separating me from the stage were terrible.”