Anna Magnani.
A tribute to Anna Magnani
A drawing of Anna Magnani by my friend Joe Fuoco.
My favorite actress of all time is Anna Magnani, 1908-1973. She was one of the cinema's great icons, like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis. I first saw her when I was still a boy and going to our local Johnston Theatre. It was as Serafina delle Rose in the 1956 The Rose Tattoo, opposite Burt Lancaster. She had mastered only enough English to play the role phonetically. Based on a play written for her by Tennessee Williams, the film earned Anna an Academy Award for best actress as a New Orleans woman devout to the memory of her departed husband (with a rose tattoo) while being swooned over by the buffoonish Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Lancaster) who dares to get a rose tattoo of his own. It was her first English-language role and she tore up the screen. Other popular American films with Magnani were Wild is the Wind with Anthony Quinn, The Fugitive Kind with Marlon Brando, and The Secret of Santa Vittoria with Anthony Quinn again.
Magnani with Oscar in Rome's Palazzo Altieri. Note Saint Peter's dome.But enthusiasts of Italian movies would have seen her before that. She burst upon the international scene with Roberto Rossellini's groundbreaking 1945 Open City (Roma, città aperta) where in an unforgettable scene she is gunned down in a Roman street, before the eyes of her young son, while running after a van taking away here resistance-fighter fiancé. That has been characterized as the defining moment in Italian post-war neorealist films. She had already been in scores of Italian movies, often minor in nature, during the 1930s and 1940s as well as in stage productions and the kind of musical variety shows very much in tune with Italian audiences.
It is an understatement to say that Anna Magnani was no sex symbol. She was plain, short and even dumpy and bedraggled. She had no figure. Her voice could be harsh and grating. She kind of broke all the rules. Yet she nevertheless exuded a sexual magnetism and dynamism given to few of the screen's femmes-fatales. When she was on the screen, you watched only her, no one else. Russell Baker remembered his first seeing Open City: "Anna Magnani walked onscreen, and I immediately realized that until that instant I had never seen a real woman on the screen."
Director Jean Renoir, who made one of Magnani's greatest films, The Golden Coach, said, "Anna Magnani is probably the greatest actress I have ever worked with. She is the complete animal - an animal created for the stage and screen." Clichés about La Magnani abound...as an earth mother, for example. She was more than anything else a woman to the nth degree.
Anna married director Goffredo Alessandrini, had an affair with actor Massimo Serato and had a son by him, Luca, born in 1942. That was the same year I was born...she could have been my mother. She doted on Luca, the truest love of her life. In later years Luca took the surname of his mother and became Luca Magnani.
For years Magnani had a tempestuous romance with director Roberto Rossellini that came to a head when the director carried on an affair with and later married Ingrid Bergman and made with her the film Stromboli., about a woman's relationship with a volcano. Not to be outdone, Magnani made her own volcano spite-film to suit her volcanic temperament. Shot on a nearby volcanic island, Vulcano, it was simply called Volcano.
It's difficult to name my favorite Magnani film, but I think it will have to be the short feature The Miracle, the second half of Rossellini's duet film called Amore. In The Miracle Magnani played a demented rural bag-lady who thinks that she is going to give birth to the baby Jesus, after being seduced by an itinerant shepherd she believes to be St. Josph. The man is played by Federico Fellini, his only role in a film when he is not playing himself. Fellini co-wrote the story of the film. The movie went on to great attacks in the U.S. for its "blasphemy and sacrilege" in the United States. It was denounced from the pulpit by Cardinal Spellman, the theatre showing it was picketed by the Knights of Columbus. The State of NY withdrew its license and banned it. The theatre owner and the distributor sued. It went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in the film's favor. Because of this Magnani/Rossellini film, films became considered a form of free speech.
In The Miracle.
My other favorites are Renoir's The Golden Coach, Visconti's Bellissima, The Rose Tattoo, L'onorevole Angelina, Suor Letizia, Nella città l'inferno, where she is a jailbird along with the great actress Giulietta Masina, and Pasolini's magnificent Mamma Roma...a name that became synonymous with Magnani herself, Mother Rome, the mother of us all. She was also called the affectionate "Nannarella"..."Little Anna." In 1988 the Museum of Modern Art in New York ran a comprehensive Magnani retrospective. I own most of her films on video.
Rome was Magnani's city and she was as much a symbol of Rome as were Romulus and Remus or the Capitoline She-Wolf itself. For decades she inhabited an appartment in the Palazzo Altieri, across from the Jesuit church of the Gesù. She could not bear to live anywhere where she could not see the rooftops of Roman buildings with their potted plants against the background vista of the dome of Saint Peter's. There she received her visitors and admirers, famous and plebeian. She was a woman of great passion but without pretense. She was generous with her friends and "Magnanimous" with her love for life and for people. Asked a recipe for her success, she replied, "To lack self-consciusness. To be beautiful. To live violently."
Late in her career she had a major stage success in Verga's La Lupa, directed by Franco Zeffirelli. It was supposed to tour the United States and I was excited with the thought of seeing Magnani in person. It never happened. The tour was canceled.
There came a point in Magnani's career where her name could no longer attract Italian movie audiences. It was then that director Alfredo Giannetti starred her in five wonderful vehicles made for Italian television, including one opposite Marcello Mastroianni called Correva l'anno di grazia 1870. Her very final screen appearance was a minuscule cameo in Federico Fellini's 1972 Roma, in which director Fellini approaches her as she is going into her Palazzo Altieri and and addresses her. Fellini tels us, "This lady who is coming home, is a Roman actress: Anna Magnani, who could also be, somehow, the symbol of the city...a Rome seen as she-wolf and vestal...aristocratic and tatterdemalion, grim, comical. I could go on all night."" Anna replies, "Oh, Federi'...go get some sleep...go on..."
When Magnani died in 1973, the funeral on September 28 was held at the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva near the Pantheon. Thousands came, dignitaries and laborers, be they aristocratic or tatterdemalion themselves, and when her casket was carried out afterwards, the crowds clapped a sustained general applause. Anna Magnani's existence had been her greatest performance.
(Cross-posted to _cinemaparadiso)
A drawing of Anna Magnani by my friend Joe Fuoco.
My favorite actress of all time is Anna Magnani, 1908-1973. She was one of the cinema's great icons, like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis. I first saw her when I was still a boy and going to our local Johnston Theatre. It was as Serafina delle Rose in the 1956 The Rose Tattoo, opposite Burt Lancaster. She had mastered only enough English to play the role phonetically. Based on a play written for her by Tennessee Williams, the film earned Anna an Academy Award for best actress as a New Orleans woman devout to the memory of her departed husband (with a rose tattoo) while being swooned over by the buffoonish Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Lancaster) who dares to get a rose tattoo of his own. It was her first English-language role and she tore up the screen. Other popular American films with Magnani were Wild is the Wind with Anthony Quinn, The Fugitive Kind with Marlon Brando, and The Secret of Santa Vittoria with Anthony Quinn again.
Magnani with Oscar in Rome's Palazzo Altieri. Note Saint Peter's dome.But enthusiasts of Italian movies would have seen her before that. She burst upon the international scene with Roberto Rossellini's groundbreaking 1945 Open City (Roma, città aperta) where in an unforgettable scene she is gunned down in a Roman street, before the eyes of her young son, while running after a van taking away here resistance-fighter fiancé. That has been characterized as the defining moment in Italian post-war neorealist films. She had already been in scores of Italian movies, often minor in nature, during the 1930s and 1940s as well as in stage productions and the kind of musical variety shows very much in tune with Italian audiences.
It is an understatement to say that Anna Magnani was no sex symbol. She was plain, short and even dumpy and bedraggled. She had no figure. Her voice could be harsh and grating. She kind of broke all the rules. Yet she nevertheless exuded a sexual magnetism and dynamism given to few of the screen's femmes-fatales. When she was on the screen, you watched only her, no one else. Russell Baker remembered his first seeing Open City: "Anna Magnani walked onscreen, and I immediately realized that until that instant I had never seen a real woman on the screen."
Director Jean Renoir, who made one of Magnani's greatest films, The Golden Coach, said, "Anna Magnani is probably the greatest actress I have ever worked with. She is the complete animal - an animal created for the stage and screen." Clichés about La Magnani abound...as an earth mother, for example. She was more than anything else a woman to the nth degree.
Anna married director Goffredo Alessandrini, had an affair with actor Massimo Serato and had a son by him, Luca, born in 1942. That was the same year I was born...she could have been my mother. She doted on Luca, the truest love of her life. In later years Luca took the surname of his mother and became Luca Magnani.
For years Magnani had a tempestuous romance with director Roberto Rossellini that came to a head when the director carried on an affair with and later married Ingrid Bergman and made with her the film Stromboli., about a woman's relationship with a volcano. Not to be outdone, Magnani made her own volcano spite-film to suit her volcanic temperament. Shot on a nearby volcanic island, Vulcano, it was simply called Volcano.
It's difficult to name my favorite Magnani film, but I think it will have to be the short feature The Miracle, the second half of Rossellini's duet film called Amore. In The Miracle Magnani played a demented rural bag-lady who thinks that she is going to give birth to the baby Jesus, after being seduced by an itinerant shepherd she believes to be St. Josph. The man is played by Federico Fellini, his only role in a film when he is not playing himself. Fellini co-wrote the story of the film. The movie went on to great attacks in the U.S. for its "blasphemy and sacrilege" in the United States. It was denounced from the pulpit by Cardinal Spellman, the theatre showing it was picketed by the Knights of Columbus. The State of NY withdrew its license and banned it. The theatre owner and the distributor sued. It went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in the film's favor. Because of this Magnani/Rossellini film, films became considered a form of free speech.
In The Miracle.
My other favorites are Renoir's The Golden Coach, Visconti's Bellissima, The Rose Tattoo, L'onorevole Angelina, Suor Letizia, Nella città l'inferno, where she is a jailbird along with the great actress Giulietta Masina, and Pasolini's magnificent Mamma Roma...a name that became synonymous with Magnani herself, Mother Rome, the mother of us all. She was also called the affectionate "Nannarella"..."Little Anna." In 1988 the Museum of Modern Art in New York ran a comprehensive Magnani retrospective. I own most of her films on video.
Rome was Magnani's city and she was as much a symbol of Rome as were Romulus and Remus or the Capitoline She-Wolf itself. For decades she inhabited an appartment in the Palazzo Altieri, across from the Jesuit church of the Gesù. She could not bear to live anywhere where she could not see the rooftops of Roman buildings with their potted plants against the background vista of the dome of Saint Peter's. There she received her visitors and admirers, famous and plebeian. She was a woman of great passion but without pretense. She was generous with her friends and "Magnanimous" with her love for life and for people. Asked a recipe for her success, she replied, "To lack self-consciusness. To be beautiful. To live violently."
Late in her career she had a major stage success in Verga's La Lupa, directed by Franco Zeffirelli. It was supposed to tour the United States and I was excited with the thought of seeing Magnani in person. It never happened. The tour was canceled.
There came a point in Magnani's career where her name could no longer attract Italian movie audiences. It was then that director Alfredo Giannetti starred her in five wonderful vehicles made for Italian television, including one opposite Marcello Mastroianni called Correva l'anno di grazia 1870. Her very final screen appearance was a minuscule cameo in Federico Fellini's 1972 Roma, in which director Fellini approaches her as she is going into her Palazzo Altieri and and addresses her. Fellini tels us, "This lady who is coming home, is a Roman actress: Anna Magnani, who could also be, somehow, the symbol of the city...a Rome seen as she-wolf and vestal...aristocratic and tatterdemalion, grim, comical. I could go on all night."" Anna replies, "Oh, Federi'...go get some sleep...go on..."
When Magnani died in 1973, the funeral on September 28 was held at the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva near the Pantheon. Thousands came, dignitaries and laborers, be they aristocratic or tatterdemalion themselves, and when her casket was carried out afterwards, the crowds clapped a sustained general applause. Anna Magnani's existence had been her greatest performance.
(Cross-posted to _cinemaparadiso)