Anna Magnani

Anna Magnani (born March 7, 1908, Rome, Italy—died September 26, 1973, Rome) was an Italian actress, known for her forceful portrayals of earthy, working-class women. She won the Academy Award for best actress for her performance in The Rose Tattoo (1955).

Born out of wedlock, Magnani never knew her father and was deserted by her mother, Marina Magnani. She was reared in poverty by her maternal grandparents. She briefly attended the Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome before joining a touring repertory company. As an entertainer in Roman nightclubs, she specialized in bawdy street songs and in vaudeville. She made her film debut in an uncredited appearance in a silent film in the late 1920s. Her first credited role was in La cieca di Sorrento (1934; The Blind Woman of Sorrento). When she appeared in Roberto Rossellini’s classic Neorealist film Roma città aperta (1945; Open City), she achieved international renown.

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Representative of her many roles, in which she often portrayed emotions that ranged from mental torment and deep grief to exuberant comedy, were the dynamic housewife who leads a fight against black-marketeering in postwar Italy in L’onorevole Angelina (1947); a shepherdess who is seduced by a stranger she imagines to be a saint in Rossellini’s Il miracolo (1948; The Miracle); and an aggressive stage mother in Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima (1951). Her first Hollywood film was The Rose Tattoo (1955). In a role written expressly for her by her close friend, the playwright Tennessee Williams, she played the robust widow of a truck driver whose encounter with a handsome new lodger (Burt Lancaster) sparks new hope. The role earned her the Academy Award for best actress. In 1960 she played opposite Marlon Brando in Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind, an adaptation of Williams’s play Orpheus Descending.

Her other notable roles included a Nevada rancher’s wife in George Cukor’s Wild Is the Wind (1957) and the wife of an Italian mayor in Stanley Kramer’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969). In both of these films her costar was Anthony Quinn. Magnani’s last film was Federico Fellini’s Roma (1972).

Magnani’s personal life was marked by relationships with Rossellini and the Italian actor Massimo Serato, with whom she had a son, Luca. After Luca became paralyzed by polio as a toddler, Magnani dedicated herself to caring for him. As one of Rome’s gattare (Italian: “cat ladies”), she was also dedicated to helping care for a feral cat colony in the city’s Torre Argentina neighborhood. She died from pancreatic cancer at age 65.