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Anna Magnani
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Anna Magnani was one tough chick. She made a career of playing courageous women and strong mothers. She was the "people's actress" in a way, the woman that many Italian women could relate to. She had an offbeat, earthy beauty that made her more accessible than other actresses. From the beginning, she had a difficult life. Born in Rome in 1908, she was abandoned by her single mother and raised by her maternal grandmother.
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Serafina Delle Rose (Anna Magnani, Mamma Roma, Wild is the Wind) is a proud woman. She has a pompous self-importance that makes her stand out among the other Italian women in her small Gulf Coast community. Her marriage to truck driver Rosario saved this destitute wretch from a miserable life in the old country, and she has faith in his love and affection. Unfortunately, Rosario has secrets, and when he dies in an accident, the truth comes pouring out. He was not only transporting produce—he was smuggling, and cheating on Serafina with a local slut.
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When she first steps onto the stage with a thunderous voice, thick accent and stereotypical Italian gestures, Theresa Gambacorta’s portrayal of Italian actress Anna Magnani comes across as overkill. Gambacorta developed La Magnani! under the direction of Elizabeth Kemp and first performed it at the Gene Frankel Theatre in the fall of 2004. She’s been acting in the biographical solo show for some time now, and it shows. The energetic performance is polished, if somewhat lacking in subtlety, and the imitation is technically impressive.It’s Oscar night 1956 – a night in which Magnani will be named Best Actress for her role as Serafina in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo. The play takes place in Anna’s memory, which is designed as a multi-leveled stage with stairs, a table and a single chair.
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Anna Magnani made her film debut in The Blind Woman of Sorrento in 1934 but her international fame came from her role in Roberto Rossellini’s 1946 film Roma, Citta Aperta (Rome, Open City), which started the Neo-realist movement in Italian films. Her first Hollywood film, Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, in which she played a tough widow of a truck driver, won her the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1955. She played highly emotional roles and covered a wide range from mental torment to comedy.
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Anna Magnani remains one of Italy's most famous actresses, and this is the only picture she made with Rossano. It was Magnani, in fact, who remarked in an interview around 1957 that by the time of Summertime and South Pacific, he had developed a "handsomeness that far exceeded his previous beauty", so, obviously, she was quite familiar with him. Her husband, Goffredo Alessandrini, would have directed him in Noi Vivi.
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“She’d probably spent the night in bars,” said filmmaker Jean Renoir, remembering Anna Magnani, star of his thrilling valentine to acting and the theater, The Golden Coach. Magnani, he explained, would arrive at the set haggard and drawn, and wonder how they could possibly shoot with her looking so wretched. To ease her anxiety, the director would suggest merely rehearsing. “By the fourth or fifth run through,” he recalled, “she looked just like a young girl.” What Renoir recognized was that Magnani, neither sylph nor sex bomb, possessed a more witchy sort of glamour, an ability — refined during her days as a café singer and stage actor — to trick a gaze away from her dark circles and broad-beamed frame and dazzle it instead with the sensual force of her sparking feline eyes, the rich rumble of her voice and an earthy bodily grace.
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Anna Magnani