The Roman Magnani and the Neapolitan Sophia Loren (24 years her junior) were born illegitimate, raised in slums, became the most famous Italian movie stars of the postwar years and are charismatic in different ways. The screen persona of the handsome, but less than conventionally beautiful Magnani was that of peasant, earth mother, struggling tenement parent in ill-fitting clothes. The tall, stately Loren moved away from working-class roles to be groomed by haute-couture designers and play aristocrats and princesses.
Magnani paid for her drama studies by singing in nightclubs, becoming know as 'the Italian Piaf', and appeared in several films before attracting attention in Vittorio de Sica's Teresa Venerdi (1941). But the making of her internationally was Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945), the first truly great neorealist movie. Her performance as a pregnant widow was so realistic that audiences abroad thought she was a non-professional and her death at the hands of the retreating Germans is among the great scenes in movie history.
She worked again with Rossellini, then her lover, but he dropped her for Ingrid Bergman. Her next great role was as a movie-obsessed mother, bent on having her little daughter win a competition at Cinecittà in Visconti's Bellissima (1951). By then, she'd met and entranced Tennessee Williams who wrote two stage roles for her, neither of which she played on Broadway, though she did appear in the film versions - as a sex-starved Italian-American widow having a healing affair with truck driver Burt Lancaster in The Rose Tattoo (1955), for which she won an Oscar, and as a shopkeeper's wife having an affair with itinerant musician Marlon Brando in a small southern town in the pretentious The Fugitive Kind (1959). Between those two, she appeared as sheep-farmer Anthony Quinn's newly imported wife in George Cukor's Wild in the Wind (1957), for which she was Oscar-nominated.
Arguably her greatest English-speaking film was Jean Renoir's exquisite The Golden Coach (1953). Back home in Italy, her greatest triumph came in Pier Paolo Pasolini's second movie, Mamma Roma (1962), as a prostitute trying to get off the streets and give her son a proper bourgeois upbringing. Seven years later, she had her last major role in The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969). She bowed out as the very spirit of Rome in Fellini's Roma (1972), before dying of pancreatic cancer.
Magnani on Magnani 'Women like me can only submit to men capable of dominating them and I have never found a man capable of dominating me.'
Jean Renoir 'The greatest actress I have ever worked with.'
Magnani to photographer 'Please don't retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.'
Essential DVDs Rome, Open City, Bellissima, Mamma Roma
Next week: Walter Matthau