It is 80 years since the release of Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), a film that changed cinema forever. Anna Magnani played perhaps her most legendary role there, becoming the face of Italian neo-realism and the “conscience of the nation”. Despite this, outside of Italy her name is much less frequently heard than, say, Sophia Loren.
However, Magnani was one of the strongest actors of the twentieth century.
She was the first Italian to win an Oscar for a leading female role – in the film “The Tattooed Rose” (1955).
Marlon Brando was afraid of her energy, Meryl Streep called her a “goddess”, and the New York Times dubbed her “the tigress of the Italian screen”.
Yet today she is far less often mentioned than other stars of the era.
The birth of a masterpiece
Roberto Rossellini shot Rome – a fascist Italy, not a colonial Italy, but a country of decent people,” explains researcher Caterina di Capalbo, author of Roma Città Aperta.
In those years, Mussolini and Hitler were still alive, and the priest’s copy in the film – “What if they come back?” – sounded like a real imprint of the entire crew’s fear.
“A real woman, not a virgin.”
Magnani played Pina, a middle-aged widow, pregnant by a partisan neighbour whom she loves and whom she plans to marry.
Her character is uneducated but wise; fair but without ostentatious moralising. A real woman, shown with warmth, respect and a realism rare in cinema.
“Finally, after years when everything in cinema was artificial – beautiful, glossy, correct – the audience saw the story of a real woman. Not of the film industry, but of someone like each and every one of us. “Her black as tar hair and burning gaze fuelled rumours of her “exotic” origins. Some even said she was Egyptian.
‘Perhaps she herself first supported this myth – for the sake of mystery,’ writes Gianfranco Angelucci, a friend of Fellini.
In fact, Anna, affectionately called Nannarella at home, was born in the heart of Rome, near Porta Pia, and never knew her father. Her mother went to Egypt, leaving her daughter behind – hence the confusion, and perhaps the inner emptiness, which Magnani turned into art.
” I realised I wasn’t born an actress,” she later wrote. – I just decided to become one in the cradle – between one extra tear and one missing love. All my life I have screamed with all my might, begging for that tear, begging for that touch “.
Photo by Getty Images
When k, Anna also acquired acting skills.
She brought the same spontaneity to the cinema. Look at her next to Marlon Brando in Runaway Tendency (1960). Brando is working for the camera, catching the light, playing with his face. And Magnani is not interested in this: she goes straight to the viewer, – explains Bernardinis.
Many scenes in “Rome – Open City” were shot from the first take – the film was not enough. So it was with the legendary episode when Pina runs after the truck carrying her beloved Francesco, and falls, hit by a bullet in the back.
Magnani recalled: We didn’t rehearse. Rossellini simply said: “Go out the door. And I was suddenly transported to a time when young people were just being grabbed in the streets… In that moment I stopped being me, I became Pina.
That scene grew out of a real tragedy. A year before filming in imes wrote that Magnani had “a rare ability to cry real tears, to laugh heartily, to fight fiercely; in anger she was formidable, and in love – incredibly sensual”.
Tennessee Williams dreamed of seeing her on Broadway in his new play – it was just one of many American offers Anna rejected. “This woman, Anna Magnani, gets right to her heart”, he said.
Ingrid Bergman loved “Rome the Open City” so much that she wrote Rossellini a letter, adding that the only Italian words she knew were Ti amo.
Rossellini, Magnani’s partner at the time, kept the correspondence secret until Anna came across a telegram from Bergman.
She calmly handed him a plate of spaghetti and asked if he was hungry. Hearing “yes,” she replied, “Then eat!” – and tapped the plate with the monk in Magnan. She has a famous phrase: the camera shouldn’t hide wrinkles.
“These wrinkles are my life,” she said.
She made even the bags under her eyes attractive.
“She hated convention, she was free – incredibly free,” her granddaughter Olivia recalls.
And yet this is what made her less “in demand” in the West. She wasn’t fantasy, she was truth.
The very fact of her existence – without damage, against the standards of beauty of her time, despite a dramatic biography – is important for a girl who chooses this profession – adds Roman actress Liliana Fiorelli.
Magnani could not be embellished, tamed or put in a museum – says film critic Flavio De Bernardinis.
How can we remember her? “Just watch her films,” replies Olivia.