On the evening that Anna Magnani left, September 26, 1973, the second Rai channel broadcast her last film, “1870”, staged as an extreme act of love by Alfredo Giannetti, who had already convinced her to use the television for the portrait -Triptych to choose. Three women”. It was a coincidence and a benevolent turn of fate, even if the great actress’s condition had already been deteriorating for some time, but 50 years later the little jewel in which Marcello Mastroianni appeared at her side remains like an epitaph for a woman , who was always unlucky in life but queen of the stage and screen.
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ANSA Agency After 50 years, Anna Magnani is still queen – Daily – Ansa.it The great artist died on September 26, 1973. The dramatic contrast between the fame she reaped on stage and the difficulties of private life (ANSA)
A Roman at heart, Anna Magnani was born on March 7, 1908 a stone’s throw from Porta Pia and grew up in the shadow of the Campidoglio under the watchful eyes of her grandmother Giovanna (of Romagna origins), five aunts and only one son per House, uncle, on Romano. Her mother Marina had left her to go to Egypt, where she will start a new life, while her father will remain unknown for many years. It is difficult to say how this double devotion shaped the personality of the girl who always painted her youth with overall smiling tones: normal schools, sober bourgeois style without waste, eight years at the Santa Cecilia music school, two years at the drama school Direction: Silvio d’Amico. In 1927 he was the first to understand that he was not dealing with an aspiring performer, but with one who “lived” his characters. And it is Anna’s determination, the tough training she goes through, that will soon make her a character. It is precisely her mimetic ability to penetrate the hearts of the women in her career that will shape the figure of the upright citizen, the “Roman she-wolf”, as one of her great admirers, the former president of the Cannes Festival, Gilles Jacob, of “Nannarella” with its most famous diminutive. She will forever be Pina, shot by the Nazis in “The Open City of Rome” (1945), Maddalena Cecconi in “Bellissima” (1951), Roma Garofolo in “Mamma Roma” (1962) and, even before that, the greengrocer Elide in “Campo of Flowers” (1943). From her unforgettable appearance in “Rome, Open City”, a key film of neorealism, came the myth of Anna Magnani, the most popular Italian actress in the world (even more than Sophia Loren) and certainly the greatest protagonist of our cinema. But Magnani was much more: she made her stage debut in the early 1930s and found a place in light theater, in vaudeville, with comedians like Antonio Gandusio, traveling companions like the De Rege brothers and Totò. She becomes famous as Sciantosa thanks to her singing skills, marries a director dandy like Goffredo Alessandrini, falls in love with a star seducer like Massimo Serato, who gives her her only and beloved son Luca, but who leaves her almost immediately. She made her film debut with “La blinde di Sorrento” (1934), but Vittorio De Sica gave her her first significant role as a vaudevillian in “Teresa Friday” (1941): here the dramatic Magnani was born. When she arrives on the set of “Rome, Open City” with Aldo Fabrizi, she is already well known and it is precisely the ingenious fusion between the professionalism of the protagonists and the naturalness of the characters captured from the street that makes her appearance unforgettable.
Thanks to the international success of the film, Anna’s charm goes beyond borders: thanks to the success in her homeland with “The Honorable Angelina” (1947), she experiences her magical moment. Jean Renoir wants her for “The Golden Coach”, Visconti makes her a “street diva” (after having to abandon her in “Obsession” because of her pregnancy), Time Magazine defines her as “divine, simply divine”, Eugene O’Neill raves about his talent when he lands in Hollywood for Daniel Mann’s The Rose Tattoo, based on the famous playwright’s text. The result will be the Oscar, which was awarded to her on March 21, 1956, the first (and only) non-English-speaking actress to win the statuette. In Hollywood she will work three more times, while in her homeland she will miss the date with “La ciociara” (she was not seen in the role of Sophia Loren’s mother), she will triumph with “Mamma Roma” despite the conflicts with Pasolini , she will once again play the role of Sciantosa in Monicelli’s “Laughter of Joy”, he will return to the theater with Zeffirelli and Menotti. All this will be his fame on the screen and on the stage, in ever more dramatic contrast to his private life. Although she did not willingly admit it, Anna Magnani was looking for love from the cradle when she understood – in her words – “I was not born an actress. It was only in the cradle, in between, that I decided to become one.” One tear too many and one caress less. All my life I have cried out with all my being for that tear, I have begged for that caress. A painful series of failed loves, a stormy relationship with Roberto Rossellini that exploded in the revenge of his film “Vulcano”, dedicated to Ingrid Bergman, on “Stromboli”; a son suffering from polio who is loved against everything and everyone; a loneliness that he proudly affirmed because he said he had never found anyone who knew how to assert his generous but flawless character, strong but fragile, volcanic but always lost. Compared to his icon, he knew that he was always a loser and today he leaves us the memory of the greatness of a Mediterranean mother, a goddess who came to earth and became earth to seek passion. 50 films and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame had not healed this wound.
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