Her Early Years
Anna Magnani was born in Rome, Italy (not in Egypt, as some biographies claim), on March 7, 1908. She was the illegitimate child of Marina Magnani, a seamstress, and an unknown father, often said to be from Alexandria, Egypt, but whom Anna herself claimed was from the Calabria region of Italy although she never knew his name. After her mother deserted her, she was raised in poverty in the ancient quarter of Rome by her maternal grandmother. At age 7, she was enrolled in a French convent school in Rome where she learned to speak French, to play the piano and guitar, and to sing. She also developed a passion for acting from watching and participating in plays that the nuns staged, especially Christmas plays. This period of formal education lasted until she was 14 years old.
In her late teens, she continued to pursue her love of acting by enrolling in the Eleonora Duse Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome for several years. She supported herself and worked her way through the Academy by singing risqué songs in cabarets and nightclubs; she also performed in vaudeville. She was so well received that she was billed as the “Italian Edith Piaf.”
She left the Academy in 1926 to take a job in a theater company that toured Italy and then in 1927, Argentina. In these early years on the stage, she played bit parts, such as ladies’ maids. For this work, she earned 25 lire a day, the equivalent of less than one dollar. In 1929, one of the troupe’s leading ladies left the group, and this gave Anna her first big break. She was cast to play a dramatic, emotional scene for which she earned rousing applause from the audience.
She earlier had made an inauspicious film debut in 1927, playing a bit part in the silent film Scampolo (The Remnant). But in the late ‘20s, films were not her main career focus; she continued to sing in cabarets and act on the stage.
She returned to films in 1934, for what some consider her film debut, in La Cieca di Sorrento (The Blind Woman of Sorrento). The director of this film was Goffredo Alessandrini, who had seen one of Magnani’s fiery stage performances in an experimental theater role in 1933. In 1935, they were married and she went into semi-retirement, initially devoting herself to the marriage, but she couldn’t stay away from the stage and soon returned. (The marriage was ultimately unsuccessful, and the couple went through a long period of separation starting in 1942. It finally ended with an annulment in 1950 since Italy did not legally recognize divorce at that time). Alessandrini discouraged her interest in film and advised her to continue to work on the stage where her natural talent was more appreciated.
However, even though Alessandrini did not consider her a strong film actress, he gave her a supporting role in his 1936 film Cavalleria (Cavalry). In the movie, she is just glimpsed very briefly singing in long shot. Nothing spectacular!
The rest of her movie roles in the 1930s were similarly inconsequential until she got a good but small role in Vittorio De Sica’s Teresa Venerdi (1941). The film is a comedy of errors in which the sweetly incompetent Dr. Pietro Vignali (Vittorio De Sica) has been forced deeply into debt by his girlfriend, Loletta Prima (Magnani). After his creditors threaten to sell his belongings, he takes a job as an orphanage health inspector to pay his debts and ends up engaged to wealthy Lilli, daughter of a mattress tycoon, and chased after by the orphan Teresa Venerdì, while trying to keep his life in order.
Playing stage star Loletta Prima in the movie, Magnani is very funny when she is making indifferent movements during rehearsal for a tacky musical. Though she’s barely in the movie, she manages to steal her scenes anyway, displaying admirable technique as she moves through the scenes and getting comic mileage out of the way the low-class Loletta puts on airs.
Following this start, for several years, she played minor roles in films that received very little critical notice. To all of these second-rate roles, however, she brought her smoldering wit and tumultuous temperament, enlivening what was otherwise dreary wartime entertainment.
Postwar Neo-Realist film: Rome, Open City
Her breakthrough film was Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) (aka Open City), generally regarded as the first commercially successful Italian Neo-Realist film of the postwar period and the one that won Magnani an international reputation. The movie was about Italy’s final days under German occupation during World War II where Magnani gave a “brilliant performance” as Pina, a woman who dies fighting to protect her husband, who is an underground fighter against the Nazis. Her harrowing death scene remains one of cinema’s most devastating moments: As the pregnant Pina, she is shot down by German soldiers 56 minutes into the film. “Francesco!” she cries, running toward her fiancée after the Nazis have arrested him. When she is shot, her body lies still in the street, her skirt above her knees so that the tops of her stockings are visible.
She was the perfect actress for this emerging Neo-Realist film style that led the world to admire Italian cinema. Neo-Realism, considered the “Golden Age of Italian Cinema,” was a sign of cultural change and social progress in Italy. The films presented contemporary stories and ideas that involved the lives of the poor and the working class. They were often shot in the streets and other outdoor locations. They frequently incorporated non-professional actors. The themes that neo-Realist films explored were the complex economic and moral conditions of post-World War II Italy, emphasizing changes in the Italian psyche and conditions of everyday life, including poverty, oppression, injustice, and desperation.
The term “Neo-Realism” was first used to describe Luchino Visconti’s 1943 film Ossessione (Obsession). Magnani had been scheduled to play the lead in this historic film, but she missed the opportunity due to pregnancy and she chose to have her son Luca even though it was not Alessandrini’s baby. Luca was the result of an affair she had had with actor Massimo Serato while she was separated from her husband. Luca was born on October 29, 1942, in Rome and came down with crippling polio at only 18 months of age. He never regained the use of his legs. As a result, Magnani spent most of her early earnings for specialists and hospitals, and she remained close to him for the rest of her life.
In 1948, Rossellini, who had become her lover, offered her showcase roles in his movie L’Amore (The Love), which was comprised of two short films, The Human Voice, a Jean Cocteau play where Magnani played a ruined and passive-aggressive lady speaking to her lover on the phone for the last time, and The Miracle, where she played a half-mad goat herder who is convinced she is carrying another Christ child after an encounter with a sly wanderer (a young Federico Fellini, who also wrote the story).
Magnani is intensely emotional and touching in both of these shorts and in very different ways: tightly wound and desperately sophisticated yet primal in The Human Voice, and then poignantly simple-minded yet understanding in The Miracle. This latter ran into trouble with US censors. Magnani reaches a religious peak of emotion and insight in The Miracle when a jeering crowd crashes a large bowl on her head and she quietly says, “God forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (The exact words Jesus uses from the cross in praying for forgiveness for his assailants).
The highly publicized affair between Magnani and Rossellini was seldom calm. She liked to stay up all night and sleep all day, and she liked dogs because, unlike people, she would say, dogs never betray you. The tensions between the 2 lovers grew as the affair became more openly known. She was usually jumpy, tired, excitable, and cranky. He was married to another woman; he had children. She had her child, an invalid, in great need of care and attention. The day finally came when rumors were feeding Magnani’s foreboding instincts. For a while she had been goading Rossellini – was there something he needed to tell her? Finally, when he had denied it repeatedly, she knew by this that he was lying to her. Magnani dumped a plate of pasta over his head! Of course, the relationship was over with this desecration of Italy’s national dish, and Magnani would be replaced by the younger and more classically beautiful Ingrid Bergman.
Her Best Film Work
In recovering from the embarrassment and rejection of Rossellini, Magnani responded in her usual way when facing setbacks: she did not seek pity, but reacted with anger and defiance. The years from 1950 to 1962 saw her best movie work. In 1951, she gave one of her greatest screen performances for director Luchino Visconti, playing a mother striving to get her plain daughter launched into movies. Bellissima (Gorgeous) was made during the “grim period” of Italy’s post-World War II recovery. In the movie Magnani abandoned all restraints; she plays a woman we would gladly strangle, but whose life force leaves us shocked. She plays Maddalena, a blustery, obstinate stage mother who drags her daughter to the Cinecittà Studios for the ‘Prettiest Girl in Rome’ contest, with dreams that her plain daughter will be a star. Her emotions in the film go from rage and humiliation to maternal love. Of course, it’s the mother who needs to act, and it was Visconti’s genius to uncover a vulnerability in the mother’s excessiveness which ultimately made the picture an international success.
This was followed in 1953, by what many critics consider Magnani’s most ideally balanced film, Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach (sometimes known by its French title–Le Carrosse D’Or). Magnani is filmed in color and she proved once again, as she had in L’Amore, that she is someone to make a film for and about. This is Renoir’s exquisite paean to actors, especially about both the loneliness and the glory of the life of an actor, and the fullness of an actor’s response to life. Laughter and anger always overtake Magnani on screen, and so watching her laugh or get angry is like listening to a singer with a voice that goes the highest up and the furthest down, like a Maria Callas living by her wits. She plays Camille (stage name Columbine), an actress in a touring commedia dell’arte stage troupe. While traveling through 18th-century Peru, she finds herself receiving romantic advances from three men: a faithful Spanish soldier (George Higgins), a dashing bullfighter (Riccardo Rioli), and a wealthy Viceroy (Duncan Lamont), who possesses the dazzling Golden Carriage of the title, which he presents to Camille and then is forced to take it back under pressure from the aristocratic class. Renoir’s real interest, though, is in the “show must go on” magic of the stage, the mysterious art of acting, and the interplay between fantasy and reality. The movie combines superb acting (especially by Magnani), elegant comedy, gorgeous color cinematography, and exquisite art direction. Renoir called Magnani “the greatest actress I have ever worked with.” Although she had never appeared in an English-speaking film, Magnani acted in English for this Renoir masterpiece that was very favorably received in the US.
American fascination with Magnani accelerated during this period, while her popularity in Italy declined. Her emotional film performances were an uncomfortable reminder of the harsh post-war years. Italian moviegoers in the more prosperous fifties were interested in flirtatious comedies featuring a provocative younger generation of female stars. Directors failed to find roles for Magnani; parts that might otherwise have been hers were given to rising actresses like Sophia Loren.
Bellissima (1951) was her last Italian film to achieve commercial success. She was becoming a cult celebrity in America, so much so that Tennessee Williams created the role of Serafina Delle Rose in The Rose Tattoo expressly for her American stage debut. However, she declined the part, fearing her English was too weak for a stage production.
An Oscar-Worthy Performance
Having no professional reasons to stay in Italy, she went to Hollywood in 1955 to make the screen version of The Rose Tattoo, directed by Daniel Mann and also starring Burt Lancaster. Her American debut turned out to be one of her most famous movies and one of her greatest roles.
In The Rose Tattoo, she plays Serafina Delle Rose, who retreats from the world when her beloved husband dies and she is left to raise a teenage daughter. But Serefina reawakens to life’s joys when she meets Alvaro (Burt Lancaster), a happy-go-lucky and lusty truck driver who has the same sunny openness her husband had, even the same occupation. On his chest is the same symbol of love, The Rose Tattoo.
Magnani won the Best Actress Oscar for her bravura portrayal (the first Italian to win an Oscar) in this drama. The picture also received eight Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture) and won three. She won other Best Actress awards for her role, including the BAFTA Film Award, Golden Globes Award, National Board of Review, and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. Convinced that she would never win the Oscar for The Rose Tattoo, she didn’t attend the ceremony. The reporter who phoned and woke her out of sound sleep in Rome to give her the news had a difficult time convincing her he wasn’t kidding. “You’re lying,” Magnani supposedly said. “If this is a joke, I’ll kill you!”
The Waning Years of Her Career
Magnani worked with Tennessee Williams again for the 1960 film, The Fugitive Kind (originally titled, Orpheus Descending) directed by Sidney Lumet, in which she played Lady Torrance and starred with Marlon Brando. Noted co-stars in the film were Joanne Woodward and Maureen Stapleton. The plot centers on Valentine “Snakeskin” Xavier (Brando), a guitar-playing drifter who flees New Orleans to avoid arrest. He finds work in a small-town five-and-dime owned by an embittered older woman known as Lady Torrance (Magnani), whose vicious husband Jabe (Victor Jory) lies on his deathbed in their apartment above the store. Both alcoholic nymphomaniac Carol Cutrere (Woodward) and simple housewife Vee Talbott (Stapleton) set their sights on the newcomer. Still, Val succumbs to the charms of Lady, who plans to set him up with a refreshment bar. Sheriff Talbott (R.G. Armstrong), a friend of Jabe, threatens to kill Val if he remains in town, but Val chooses to stay when he discovers Lady is pregnant. His decision sparks Jabe’s jealousy and leads to tragic consequences.
Brando demanded and got an unheard-of million-dollar contract. Still, the film’s producers expected a smash hit, considering all of the talent assembled for a work by the very popular Williams. But The Fugitive Kind failed to meet expectations, with the trouble beginning even before the filming started. Brando and Magnani’s working relationship became strained during rehearsals and further deteriorated when filming began. Magnani was over 50, and Brando was 17 years younger. Brando later wrote that Magnani attacked him physically. Building on a wild kiss, she put a bite on the actor. She was drawing him towards bed and he escaped only by pinching her nose until she freed him. Essentially, two massive egos collided. As for the film, the final results were odd, and both audiences and critics were turned off.
Following that film, but not as a result of its poor critical reception, Magnani’s screen activity shrank even more. Her age was probably more responsible than anything for her diminished activity: In 1960, she was fifty-two years old, and acting opportunities for women in that age bracket were limited, especially for a singular performer like Magnani.
In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962), she is both a mother and a whore, playing an irrepressible prostitute determined to give her teenage son a respectable middle-class life. She appeared in several very long tracking shots, ending one of them with an indelible line that she directs to Jesus up in the sky: “Explain to me why I’m a nobody and you’re the king of kings?”
Mamma Roma, while one of Magnani’s critically acclaimed films, was not released in the US until 1995 because it was deemed too controversial in 1962. By this time she had become frustrated at being typecast in the roles of poor women. In 1963 she commented “I’m bored stiff with these everlasting parts as a hysterical, loud, working-class woman.”
But she would return to this type-cast character in the 1969 film The Secret of Santa Vittoria, starring Anthony Quinn as the mayor, Italo Bombolini, and Magnani as his wife, Rosa. The film was directed by Stanley Kramer and selected as the opening-night film for the 13th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival in October 1969.
The film is set during World War II in the summer of 1943, in the aftermath of the fall of Italy’s Fascist government under Mussolini. The German army uses the ensuing political vacuum to occupy most of the country. The wine-making hill town of Santa Vittoria learns that the German occupation forces want to steal all of Santa Vittoria’s wine and take it back to Germany. The townspeople organize under the inspiration of their mayor, Italo Bombolini (Anthony Quinn). They hide a million bottles of wine by sealing them up in the galleries of an ancient Roman cave before the arrival of a German army detachment under the command of Sepp von Prum (Hardy Krüger).
The Germans are given thousands of bottles of wine to appease them, but von Prum comes to suspect that there are many more hidden somewhere in Santa Vittoria. The two very different men engage in a battle of wits in the days to come. Von Prum orders every building and home searched, but his men find nothing. Finally, with time running out before the Germans must obey their orders and leave, a frustrated von Prum threatens to shoot Mayor Bombolini in front of the assembled townspeople unless the hidden wine’s location is given up. No one speaks up! Not being a Nazi fanatic, von Prum silently accepts defeat and leaves the hill town without harming the mayor. After the Germans leave Santa Vittoria, the townspeople, led by Bombolini, celebrate their victory by dancing in the streets.
Magnani and Quinn constantly feuded in private, away from the view of the cameras, and their animosity spilled over into their scenes together. When the fight scene between the mayor and his wife was ready to shoot, the stars were warmed up and rarin’ to go at it. Magnani went for Quinn, throwing crockery at him and then dumping a bowl of pasta on his head. She also attacked him physically, beating him with a rolling pin and finally kicking him with her foot. She kicked so hard that she broke a bone in her right foot. She also bit him in the neck. When Quinn protested: “That’s not in the script,” Magnani snarled back at him, “I’m supposed to win this fight, remember!”
In Her Last Days, She Stays Fierce
Her work rate lessened after that, though she returned for a series of films for Italian TV in 1971 and then her final appearance on film with a cameo as herself in Federico Fellini’s Roma (1972). The director catches her after a night on the town and tells her that she is the very spirit of Rome. “Oh, you think so?” she asks lightly, laughing in his face before closing her door. Although not known then, this would ultimately become symbolic of closing the door on her career and life.
When Magnani became ill, Rossellini reached out to her (they hadn’t spoken in 13 years) and sent a note reading, “If you need me, call.” She immediately contacted him, and when he saw her she said, “Spit on my hand, buddy. Sit down. Listen. I’m really sick, seriously sick, but dying pisses me off, so you have to stay here and stop me from dying.” He told her, “OK, I’ll stay here and I won’t let you die.” Rossellini stayed with Magnani for 45 days, and when the time came he said, “I accompanied her to the other side without her realizing she was dying.”
She died of pancreatic cancer on September 26, 1973 at the age of 65. In addition to Rossellini, her son Luca was also at her bedside when she died.
At Magnani’s funeral, 150,000 people came to pay tribute, and they applauded with a standing ovation as her casket was carried out of church. She was buried in Rossellini’s family mausoleum.
No one had been more alive on the screen than Anna Magnani. She was renowned for her earthy, passionate, woman-of-the-soil roles, perfect for the Neo-Realism of post-war Italian cinema. In tribute to her acting ability, Rossellini said of her: “In two hours of Anna, there’s everything. Summer, winter, tenderness, fury, jealousy, fighting, break-up, goodbye, tears, repentance, pardon, ecstasy, and then, once again, suspicion, anger, blows.” They called her “La Lupa,” and a “living she-wolf symbol” of the cinema, and that fierceness is her legacy, that hope that still burned in her eyes no matter how many or how deep were her disappointments in her screen roles and in her life.
Adapted by James J. Boitano, PhD from:
Callahan, Dan. La Lupa: A Celebration of Anna Magnani
Balder & Dash website, May 16, 2016
Encyclopedia of World Biography website
IMDb website
MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) website
Film Society of Lincoln Center: All-Celluloid Anna Magnani Retrospective
Film Link Daily website, April 5, 2016
Wikipedia
