Anna Magnani

Anna Magnani ran after the truck and was shot in the street, and that single scene is the image neorealism is remembered by. She was born in Rome and raised by her grandmother, never knew her father, and worked her way up through cabaret, revue and variety before films. Rossellini cast her in Rome, Open City in 1945 as a pregnant working-class woman engaged to a resistance printer; her death running after the German truck carrying him away was improvised in a real street and is the most reproduced shot in Italian cinema. She refused to have her face lit flatteringly or her eyes retouched, saying the lines had been earned. Tennessee Williams wrote The Rose Tattoo for her and waited years while she learned enough English to play it; she won the Academy Award for the film in 1956, the first for an actress performing in English as a second language. Her affair with Rossellini ended when he left for Ingrid Bergman. Rome closed the streets for her funeral. She had a son, Luca, who contracted polio at eighteen months, and she worked to pay for his treatment for the rest of her life. Bellissima, directed by Visconti in 1951, has her as a mother pushing a child into a film audition and is her own best performance by many accounts. She turned down parts that asked her to be decorative and took ones written for a woman of forty when she was fifty. Mamma Roma was made for her by Pasolini. She is buried in the Rossellini family tomb, at his family s insistence.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history