Anna Magnani
Anna Maria Magnani was an Academy Award-winning Italian actress. She was known for her explosive acting and earthy, realistic portrayals of characters.
Born in either Rome or Alexandria and raised in Rome, she worked her way through Rome's Academy of Dramatic Art by singing at night clubs. During her career, her only child was stricken by polio when he was 18 months old and remained disabled. She was referred to as "La Lupa", the "perennial toast of Rome" and a "living she-wolf symbol" of the cinema. Time described her personality as "fiery", and drama critic Harold Clurman said her acting was "volcanic". In the realm of Italian cinema, she was "passionate, fearless, and exciting", an actress whom film historian Barry Monush calls "the volcanic earth mother of all Italian cinema." Director Roberto Rossellini called her "the greatest acting genius since Eleonora Duse". Playwright Tennessee Williams became an admirer of her acting and wrote The Rose Tattoo specifically for her to star in, a role for which she received an Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first Italian – and first non-native English speaking woman – to win an Oscar.
After meeting director Goffredo Alessandrini, she received her first screen role in The Blind Woman of Sorrento and later achieved international attention in Rossellini's Rome, Open City, which is seen as launching the Italian neorealism movement in cinema. As an actress, she became recognized for her dynamic and forceful portrayals of "earthy lower-class women" in such films as L'Amore, Bellissima, The Rose Tattoo, The Fugitive Kind and Mamma Roma. As early as 1950, Life had already stated that Magnani was "one of the most impressive actresses since Garbo".
Early years
Magnani's parentage and birthplace are uncertain. Some sources suggest she was born in Rome, others suggest Egypt. Her mother was Marina Magnani. Film director Franco Zeffirelli, who claimed to know Magnani well, states in his autobiography that she was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to an Italian-Jewish mother and Egyptian father, and that "only later did she become Roman when her grandmother brought her over and raised her in one of the Roman slum districts." Magnani herself stated that her mother was married in Egypt, but returned to Rome before giving birth to her at Porta Pia, and did not know how the rumor of her Egyptian birth got started. She was enrolled in a French convent school in Rome, where she learned to speak French and play the piano. She also developed a passion for acting from watching the nuns stage their Christmas plays. This period of formal education lasted until the age of 14.She was a "plain, frail child with a forlornness of spirit". Her grandparents compensated by pampering her with food and clothes. Yet while growing up, she is said to have felt more at ease around "more earthly" companions, often befriending the "toughest kid on the block". This trait carried over into her adult life when she proclaimed, "I hate respectability. Give me the life of the streets, of common people."
At age 17, she went on to study at the Eleonora Duse Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome for two years. To support herself, Magnani sang in nightclubs and cabarets; leading to her being dubbed "the Italian Édith Piaf". However, her actor friend Micky Knox writes that she "never studied acting formally" and started her career in Italian music halls singing traditional Roman folk songs. "She was instinctive" he writes. "She had the ability to call up emotions at will, to move an audience, to convince them that life on the stage was as real and natural as life in their own kitchen." Film critic David Thomson wrote that Magnani was considered an "outstanding theatre actress" in productions of Anna Christie and The Petrified Forest.
Early acting career
In 1933, Magnani was acting in experimental plays in Rome when she was discovered by Italian filmmaker Goffredo Alessandrini. The couple married the same year.Nunzio Malasomma directed her in her first major film role in The Blind Woman of Sorrento. Goffredo Alessandrini directed her in Cavalry.
For director Vittorio De Sica, Magnani starred in Teresa Venerdì. De Sica called this Magnani's "first true film". In it, she plays Loletta Prima, the girlfriend of De Sica’s character, Pietro Vignali. De Sica described Magnani's laugh as "loud, overwhelming, and tragic".
Italian stardom
Magnani became a major star in post-War Italian cinema, coming to international prominence in the films of Roberto Rossellini and other Italian directors.''Rome, Open City'' (1945)
Magnani gained international renown as Pina in Roberto Rossellini's neorealist Rome, Open City. In a film about Italy's final days under German occupation during World War II, Magnani's character dies fighting to protect her husband, an underground fighter against the Nazis.''L'Amore: The Human Voice and The Miracle'' (1948)
Other collaborations with Rossellini include L'Amore, a two-part film which includes The Miracle and The Human Voice. In the former, Magnani, playing a peasant outcast who believes the baby she is carrying is Christ, plumbs both the sorrow and the righteousness of being alone in the world. The latter film is based on Jean Cocteau's play about a woman desperately trying to salvage a relationship over the telephone.''Volcano'' (1950)
After The Miracle, Rossellini promised to direct Magnani in a film he was preparing, which he told her would be "the crowning vehicle of her career". However, when the screenplay was completed, he instead gave the role for Stromboli to Ingrid Bergman, later Rossellini's lover. This permanently ended Magnani's personal and professional association with Rossellini.As a result, Magnani took on the starring role of Volcano, which was said to have been produced to invite a comparison. Both films were shot in similar locales of Aeolian Islands, only 40 kilometres apart; both actresses played independent-minded roles in a neorealist fashion; and both films were shot simultaneously. Life wrote "in an atmosphere crackling with rivalry... Reporters were accredited, like war correspondents, to one or the other of the embattled camps...Partisanship infected the Via Veneto, where Magnaniacs and Bergmaniacs clashed frequently." However, Magnani still considered Rossellini the "greatest director she ever acted for".
''Bellissima'' (1951)
In Luchino Visconti's Bellissima, she plays Maddalena, a blustery, obstinate stage mother who drags her daughter to Cinecittà for the 'Prettiest Girl in Rome' contest, with dreams that her plain daughter will be a star. Her emotions in the film went from those of rage and humiliation to maternal love.''The Golden Coach'' (1952)
Magnani then went on to star as Camille in Jean Renoir's film The Golden Coach. She played a woman torn with desire for three men - a soldier, a bullfighter, and a viceroy. Renoir called her "the greatest actress I have ever worked with".Art critic of the time, Pauline Kael, says that The Golden Coach was Magnani's greatest screen performance.
American Films
''The Rose Tattoo'' (1955)
She played the widowed mother of a teenaged daughter in Daniel Mann's 1955 film, The Rose Tattoo, based on the play by Tennessee Williams. It co-starred Burt Lancaster, and was Magnani's first English-speaking role in a mainstream Hollywood movie, winning her the Academy Award for Best Actress. Lancaster, who played the role of a "lusty truck driver", said, "if she had not found acting as an outlet for her enormous vitality, she would have become a great criminal".Film historian John DiLeo has written that Magnani's acting in the film "displays why she is inarguably one of the half dozen greatest screen actresses of all time", and added:
"Whenever Magnani laughs or cries, it's as if you've never seen anyone laugh or cry before: has laughter ever been so burstingly joyful or tears so shatteringly sad?
Tennessee Williams wrote the screenplay and based the character of Serafina on Magnani as Williams was a great admirer of her acting abilities, and he even stipulated that the movie "must star what Time described as "the most explosive emotional actress of her generation, Anna Magnani." In his Memoirs, Williams described why he insisted on Magnani playing this role:
"Anna Magnani was magnificent as Serafina in the movie version of Tattoo...She was as unconventional a woman as I have known in or out of my professional world, and if you understand me at all, you must know that in this statement I am making my personal estimate of her honesty, which I feel was complete. She never exhibited any lack of self-assurance, any timidity in her relations with that society outside of whose conventions she quite publicly existed...he looked absolutely straight into the eyes of whomever she confronted and during that golden time in which we were dear friends, I never heard a false word from her mouth."
It was originally staged on Broadway with Maureen Stapleton, as Magnani's English was too limited at the time for her to star. Magnani won other Best Actress awards for her role, including the BAFTA Film Award, Golden Globes Award, National Board of Review, USA, and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards.
When her name was announced as the Oscar winner, an American journalist called her in Rome to tell her the news; he had difficulty convincing her he was serious.
''Wild is the Wind''
Magnani worked again in the United States, speaking both English and Italian, in George Cukor's drama Wild Is the Wind, in which she played the Italian bride of sheep farmer Anthony Quinn who falls for his surrogate son Tony Franciosa. Both Magnani and Quinn were nominated for Oscars for their performances.Magnani and Quinn would later star in the less successful The Secret of Santa Vittoria.