Anna Maria Magnani (; 7 March 1908 – 26 September 1973) was an Italian actress. She was the first Italian woman to win an Academy Award.
Born and raised in Rome, Italy or Alexandria, she worked her way through Rome's Academy of Dramatic Art by singing at night clubs. 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 (1955) specifically for her to star in, a role for which she received an Academy Award for Best Actress.
After meeting director Goffredo Alessandrini, she received her first screen role in The Blind Woman of Sorrento (La cieca di Sorrento, 1934) and later achieved international attention in Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945), which is seen as launching the Italian neorealism movement in cinema. in such films as L'Amore (1948), Bellissima (1951), The Rose Tattoo (1955), The Fugitive Kind (1960) and Mamma Roma (1962). As early as 1950, Life had already stated that Magnani was "one of the most impressive actresses since Garbo".]]
Magnani's parentage and birthplace are uncertain. Some sources suggest she was born in Rome, others suggest Egypt. Her mother was Marina Magnani. 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. 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.
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 (Roma, città aperta, 1945). 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 (1948), a two-part film 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 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.
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".</blockquote>
Tennessee Williams wrote the screenplay and based the character of Serafina on Magnani as Williams was a great admirer of her acting abilities, In his Memoirs, Williams described why he insisted on Magnani playing this role:<blockquote>"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...[s]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."</blockquote>
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 (1957), 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 (1969).
The Fugitive Kind
She then appeared in another Tennessee Williams property, the 1960 film The Fugitive Kind, which originally was titled Orpheus Descending after the play on which it was based). Directed by Sidney Lumet, she co-starred with Marlon Brando, for whom this also was a reunion with Williams, whose A Streetcar Named Desire vaulted him to stardom. In the film, she played Lady Torrance, a woman "hardened by life's cruelties and a grief that will not fade."</blockquote>
The production was troubled, as Magnani and Brando did not get along. David Thomson has written:<blockquote>Rumors had it that Magnani (fifty-one at the time) assumed in advance that there would be a sexual encounter with Brando (thirty-six), and when that failed to materialize, she became aggressive and insecure; and that Brando believed she refrained from washing to goad him.</blockquote>
The movie received mixed reviews and was a failure at the box office.
Other Italian films
Magnani continued to work in Italian movies. ...And the Wild Wild Women (Nella Città L'Inferno, 1958) paired her as an unrepentant streetwalker with Giulietta Masina, Federico Fellini's wife and star, in a women-in-prison film.
Mamma Roma (1962)
In Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962), Magnani is both the mother and the whore, playing an irrepressible prostitute determined to give her teenaged 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 33 years earlier. By now, she was frustrated at being typecast in the roles of poor women. Magnani in 1963 commented, "I’m bored stiff with these everlasting parts as a hysterical, loud, working-class woman".
The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969)
thumb|180px|left|Autographed photo, 1969
In one of her last film roles, The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969), she co-starred with Anthony Quinn, with whom she had appeared with a decade before in Wild is the Wind. They played husband and wife in what Life called "perhaps the most memorable fight since Jimmy Cagney smashed Mae Clarke in the face with a half a grapefruit."
In real life as well as in their reel life, Magnani and Quinn feuded in private outside view of the cameras, and their animosity spilled over into their scenes:<blockquote>"By the time the movie makers were ready to shoot the fight scene, the stars were ready, too.
Magnani not only went for Quinn with the pasta and with a rolling pin, but [also] with her foot; she kicked so hard she broke a bone in her right foot. She also bit him in the neck. 'That's not in the script', Quinn protested. Magnani snarled, 'I'm supposed to win this fight, remember?"</blockquote>
Fellini's Roma (1972)
She later played herself (within a dramatic context) in Federico 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".
Acting style
According to film critic Robin Wood, Magnani's "persona as a great actress is built, not on transformation, but on emotional authenticity... [she] doesn't portray characters but expresses 'genuine' emotions."|David di Donatello for Best Actress|Nominated — Academy Award for Best Actress|Nominated — BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role|Nominated — Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Drama
|-
| 1957
| Suor Letizia
| Sister Letizia
|
|-
| 1957
| ...And the Wild Wild Women
| Egle
|
|-
| 1960
| data-sort-value="Fugitive Kind"|The Fugitive Kind
| Lady Torrance
|
|-
| 1960
| The Passionate Thief
| Gioia Fabbricotti
|
|-
| 1962
| Mamma Roma
| Mamma Roma
|
|-
| 1966
| Made in Italy
| Adelina
|
|-
| 1969
|data-sort-value="Secret of Santa Vittoria"|The Secret of Santa Vittoria
| Rosa
| Nominated — Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
|-
| 1971
| Tre donne
| La sciantosa - Flora Bertucciolli; 1943: Un incontro - Jolanda Morigi; L'automobile - Anna Mastronardi
| 3-part TV miniseries
|-
| 1971
| Correva l'anno di grazia 1870 (1870)
| Teresa Parenti
| Italian Golden Globe Award for Best Actress
|-
| 1972
| Roma
| Herself
|
|}
References
External links
- "Archivio Anna Magnani, new web site dedicated to Anna Magnani. Biography, interviews, filmography, vintage items, books, and much more."
- "Anna Magnani - book-biography"
- "TENNESSEE AND THE ROMAN MUSE", article by Franco D'Alessandro at francodalessandro.com