Italian actress Monica Bellucci and her French actor husband Vincent Cassel have become the parents of a baby girl named Leonie, born Friday in Rome, the actress announced on the Italian edition of Vanity Fair website."She has arrived -- a pretty little brunette. It was a natural birth like that of old peasant women, the labour lasted two-and-a-half hours," Bellucci, 45, said on the site www.style.it.
Leonie weighed 3.2 kilogrammes (seven pounds), said the new mother who has been married to Cassel, 43, since 1999 and with whom she has a daughter Deva, now five years old.
In a recent issue of Vanity Fair Italy, which included a photograph of the glamorous actress during her pregnancy, Bellucci commented on giving birth in her forties.
She said it took "courage to have children late because of the risks for yourself and for the child."
But she added that she considered herself "very lucky" to have had a healthy first child "by natural birth like a peasant woman from Umbria", the region of Italy where the actress was born.
Bellucci, a former model, has appeared in Hollywood films such as "The Matrix Reloaded", "The Brothers Grimm" and "Don't Look Back".
