Anna Magnani

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Anna Magnani
Born	7 March 1908(1908-03-07) Rome, Italy
Died	26 September 1973 (aged 65) Rome, Italy
Spouse(s)	Goffredo Alessandrini (1935-1950)

Anna Magnani (7 March 1908 – 26 September 1973) was an Italian stage and film actress. Magnani won the Oscar for her lusty portrayal of a Sicilian widow in The Rose Tattoo.

[edit] Biography

Born in Rome, she was raised by her maternal grandmother and grew up stricken by poverty in a slum district of the city. After some education at a convent school, she enrolled at Rome's Academy of Dramatic Art. To support herself, Magnani sang in nightclubs and cabarets leading to her being dubbed "the Italian Édith Piaf".

In 1927 she acted in the screen version of La Nemica e Scampolo. She had also been in the stage production. She met Italian filmmaker Goffredo Alessandrini in 1933 and the couple married in 1935. He was one of the first Italian filmmakers to make use of sound. Her marriage to Alessandrini ended in 1950; she never remarried. Magnani once said: "Women like me can only submit to men capable of dominating them, and I have never found anyone capable of dominating me."

Later, she had a relationship with actor Massimo Serato, which produced her son, Cellino, affectionately called Luca. He contracted polio at an early age: Magnani tried everything to find a cure.^[1]

In 1941, Magnani starred in Teresa Venerdì, (Friday Theresa) which the writer and director, Vittorio De Sica, called Magnani’s "first true film". In it she plays Loletta Prima, the girlfriend of Di Sica’s character, Pietro Vignali. De Sica had called her laugh, "loud, overwhelming, and tragic".

[edit] International career

Her film career had spread over almost 20 years before she gained international renown as Pina in Roberto Rossellini's neorealist milestone Roma, Cittá Aperta. (also known as Rome, Open City, 1945). Her harrowing death scene remains one of cinema's most devastating moments. In Italy (and gradually elsewhere) she soon became established as a star, although she lacked the conventional beauty and glamour often associated with the term. Slightly plump and rather short in stature with a face framed by unkempt raven hair and eyes encircled by deep, dark shadows, she smouldered with seething earthiness and volcanic temperament.

Magnani was Rossellini’s second choice to play the role of Pina. He had originally wanted Clara Calamai, the lead of Ossessione (1942), (a part Luchino Visconti had originally offered Magnani) but she was already under contract and working on another film. Rossellini almost had to resort to his third actress choice because Magnani demanded she be paid the same amount of money the male lead Aldo Fabrizi was earning. The difference in salary was only 100,000 lire, and more about principle than price. (Nevertheless, she needed the money for her son's expensive medical treatments for polio.)^[2] Rossellini, whom she called "this forceful, secure courageous man", was her lover at the time, and she collaborated with him on other films.

Other collaborations with Rossellini include L'Amore, a two part film from 1948 which includes "The Miracle" and "The Human Voice" ("Il miracolo", and "Una voce umana"). In the former, Magnani, playing a peasant outcast who believes the baby she's carrying is Christ, plumbs both the sorrow and the righteousness of being alone in the world. The latter film, based on Jean Cocteau's play about a woman desperately trying to salvage a relationship over the telephone, is remarkable for the ways in which Magnani's powerful moments of silence segue into cries of despair. One could surmise that the role of this unseen lover was Rossellini, and was based on conversations that took place throughout their own real-life affair.

In Luchino Visconti's Bellissima (1951) she plays Maddalena, a blustery, obstinate stage mother who drags her daughter to Cinecittà for the 'Prettiest Girl in Rome' contest. When she realizes that the studio heads are laughing at her daughter's screen test, a shattering close-up of Magnani's face reveals rage, humiliation, and maternal love. She starred as Camille, a woman torn between three men, in Jean Renoir’s film Le Carrosse d'or (also known as The Golden Coach, 1953). Renoir called her "the greatest actress I have ever worked with".

As the widowed mother of a teenage daughter in Daniel Mann's 1955 film of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo, Magnani's adroit, mercurial performing offsets the Method acting style of co-star Burt Lancaster. It wasn’t until then that she broke into Hollywood mainstream cinema with her first English speaking role. Playing Serafina Delle Rose in The Rose Tattoo, she won the Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar. Tennessee Williams wrote it and based the character of Serafina on Magnani, since the two were good friends. It was originally put on stage starring Maureen Stapleton, because Magnani’s English was too limited at the time for her to star. Magnani worked with Williams again in his 1959 film, The Fugitive Kind, where she played Lady Torrance and starred with Marlon Brando.

The Wild, Wild Women (1958) paired Magnani, as an unrepentant streetwalker, with Giulietta Masina in a women-in-prison film. In Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962), Magnani is both the mother and the whore, playing an irrepressible prostitute determined to give her teenage son a respectable middle-class life. Mamma Roma, while one of Magnani's critically acclaimed films, was not released in the United States until 1995, deemed too controversial thirty years earlier. By now she was frustrated at being typecast in parts as poor women. Magnani in 1963 commented: "I’m bored stiff with these everlasting parts as hysterical, loud, working-class women".

Her final film performances were in The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969) as Rosa and (uncredited) as herself (within a dramatic context) in Fellini's Roma (1972). Towards the end of her career, Magnani was quoted as having said, "The day has gone when I deluded myself that making movies was art. Movies today are made up of…intellectuals who always make out that they’re teaching something"

She died at the age of 65 in Rome, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. A huge crowd gathered for her funeral in a final salute that Romans usually reserve for Popes. She was provisionally laid to rest in the Roberto Rossellini's family mausoleum, her favorite director and longtime friend. She now rests in the Cimitero Comunale, San Felice Circeo, Lazio, Italy.

[edit] Family

• Francesco Magnani: Father
• Marina Casadei: Mother
• Luca: Son
• Olivia Magnani: Granddaughter

[edit] Relationships

• Goffredo Alessandrini (husband 1935-1950)
• Massimo Serato
• Roberto Rossellini
• Walter Chiari

[edit] Filmography and awards

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Anna Magnani at the Internet Movie Database

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