Muti modeled as a teenager and made her film debut in 1970 in La moglie più bella (aka The Most Beautiful Wife). She has primarily worked in Italian films but she made her English-speaking film debut as Princess Aura in Flash Gordon in 1980. American movies she appeared in include Love and Money (1982), Casanova (1987), Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1989), A Season of Giants (1990), Oscar (1991), Once Upon a Crime (1992), Somewhere in the City (1998) and To Rome with Love (2012).
She is mostly known to the French for appearing in a television commercial of Giovanni Panzani pasta. She was voted "The Most Beautiful Woman in the World" in 1994 by a worldwide poll of readers of the magazine Class.