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Anna Magnani: Rose Tattoo
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Anna Magnani (March 7, 1908 - September 26, 1973) was an Academy Award-winning Italian stage and film actress. Magnani won the Academy Award for her lusty portrayal of a Sicilian widow in The Rose Tattoo.
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Magnani's first major film was "Do You Like Women" (1941), directed by Vittorio De Sica. Her breakthrough was Roberto Rossellini's "Roma, città aperta" (1945) ("Open City"), a major Italian "neorealist" film of the postwar years. She won an Academy Award for her performance in 1955's "The Rose Tattoo," a movie version of the play by Tennessee Williams. Williams wrote the part for her; Maureen Stapleton originated it on Broadway. Her last film was Federico Fellini's "Roma" (1972). She died in Rome of pancreatic cancer in 1973.
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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 hammy 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 opposite Marlon Brando.
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In The Rose Tattoo (AAN) Magnani portrays the Italian-born Serafina Delle Rose, a self-tortured widow in a small American town who is brought out of her grief by truck driver Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Burt Lancaster). Tennessee Williams claimed to have written the 1950 play on which the film is based specifically for Magnani, but Maureen Stapleton played the role on Broadway. The movie script, cowritten by Williams, takes full advantage of Magnani's earthy and highly expressive screen presence. Her performance emphasizes broad shifts in the mental and emotional states of her character, but many criticized the script for not fully exploring the psychological state of Serafina Delle Rose. This was Magnani's first Hollywood film, and she went on to perform in several other Hollywood pictures, most notably in George Cukor's Wild Is the Wind (1957).
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Magnani's innate ability to communicate with even American filmgoers made her a shoo-in for the Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of Serafina in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo in 1955. Gambacorta starts and ends her play on Oscar night, which Magnani is spending at her Rome apartment. Fair enough. But the device she uses to flash back to the rest of Magnani's life makes no sense: talking to her beloved -- and absent -- Tenn of her fractured childhood, her loves, her crippled son, and her life in Italian cinema. Williams was her American discoverer, best friend, English-language coach, and personal playwright (he wrote The Rose Tattoo for her); she would already have told him these stories many times.
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Scripted by famed playwright Tennessee Williams, The Rose Tattoo stars Anna Magnani as Serafina Delle Rose, a Sicilian woman who now lives in the American South. As the film opens, she is still mourning the death of her beloved husband, constantly telling herself stories of their time together. Her fragile emotional existence is shattered when she discovers that her husband had been carrying on with another woman. Luckily, Serafina ... meets truck driver Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Burt Lancaster) around this time, and their tentative romance may help her through this troubling time. Williams wrote the script for Magnani, who was awarded an Oscar for her work in the film. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
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