More than 83,000 people had liked the picture as of early Monday morning. Alessandra Mussolini, a former actress and Playboy cover model who is a member of the European parliament, wasn't one of them. "You are a bastard," she wrote to Carrey on Sunday. The far-right politician, who has aggressively defended her deceased grandfather and even fought to pass the family name down to her children, didn't stop there. Suggesting that Carrey should instead try his hand at depicting various dark points in American history, she asked if he was familiar with the story of Rosa Parks and sent him a photo of an atomic bomb setting off a mushroom cloud. When reminded that Carrey was born in Canada, she pointed out, correctly, that he is a naturalised American citizen.

By early Monday morning, Carrey, who typically does not engage with his many critics on social media, had yet to respond. But after declaring his drawings to be "dirty paper," Mussolini went on to argue with Twitter users who had criticised her grandfather for several hours on Sunday, calling one a "piece of human garbage" and insulting the families of others, in both English and Italian. Alessandra Mussolini Credit:Alessandramussolini.it Even after declaring that she had "had enough fun" she kept going, using language to dismiss her many antagonists. "Do you want applause?" she asked one man who had informed her that his grandfather "fought to liberate Europe from people like your grandfather." Eventually, she concluded her Twitter rampage by announcing that American antifascists were even more boring than those in Italy, and certainly much more sensitive and irritable.

The news that Il Duce has a living descendant with a decades-long career in Italian politics came as a surprise to many Americans who logged onto Twitter just in time to witness the bizarre meltdown. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Munich, Germany, in 1940. Credit:Shutterstock But even before her beef with a comedian arguably best known for playing oafish characters in 1990s gross-out films, much of Mussolini's life story sounded like the result of a session of Mad Libs, the game in which nouns and verbs are added at random to make unlikely statements. For one thing, she's also the niece of actress Sophia Loren, which allowed her to make her movie debut at the age of 9. (Loren's sister, Maria Scicolone, married Benito Mussolini's third son, the jazz musician Romano Mussolini, in 1962.) Alessandra Mussolini starred in a dozen Italian-language movies between 1972 and 1990 and released a pop album titled Amore in Japan in 1982. The following year, she appeared on the cover of both the German and Italian editions of Playboy magazine.

"Every actress does topless and stuff like this; you have to," she told the Independent in 2004. In 1992, after graduating from medical school, she was elected to the Italian Parliament as a member of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, which was seen as a successor to her grandfather's National Fascist Party. Her campaign was backed by die-hard fascists, and some elderly men who attended her campaign speeches broke into tears and gave the fascist salute. But she also declared herself to be a supporter of democracy, insisting that she hated the word "fascism." "I am not a fascist and my party is not really fascist," she explained at the time. "All we want is change in Italy. I want to be the voice of joy and anger of the common people." Speaking to the Independent in 2004, she shrugged off questions about her family's role in one of the darkest chapters of history, noting that she had never known anything different.