Anna Magnani was a unique figure in Italian cinema described to carry herself with “visceral vitality, existential impulsiveness and passionate abandon.” (Mitchell) Time magazine called her the “world’s greatest actress” in 1955. She took on “grittily realistic, unglamorized roles of popolana (woman of the people) and a partisan heroine, two key Italian archetypes that she would both create and reflect. While watching her films, it’s clear that she stands out among other Hollywood starlets–she wears no makeup, her hair isn’t styled, and she carries herself roughly and without grace. This created a sense of authenticity in her image–typical of publicity in the 40’s and 50’s that wanted audiences to believe that stars showed their true selves in their film roles.
Like many other stars, Magnani’s image extended beyond who she was as a person and became a location of debate for the set of problems or contradictions she would come to represent within culture. Her ‘woman of the people’ reputation, although constructed, emerged from a very real set of economic and political conditions in Italy following WWII. In 1945, Germany had just recently left Italian land, film studios were closed, director Rossellini had to buy extra film stock from street photographers, and there were no time or facilities to review rushes. This lent to the realistic feel that films like Roma Citta Aparta had that would captivate American audiences and critics in the 60s.
Magnani was a proud non-professional actor. She expressed a desire to portray authentic characters that audiences can believe, and she chose roles that she felt were real characters with identifiable emotion and “to whom I dedicate myself to with sincerity, enthusiasm, and love.” This is evident when watching her perform: she appears to dedicate her whole body and self to whatever role she’s in. In 1947, The New York Times called her a spectacle and an impulsive “one-woman show.”
After Magnani was thrust into the spotlight after a scandal involving Ingrid Bergman, it became clear that she was not like other female stars. US critics were obsessed with her “unconventional” attractiveness and “feisty” behavior. Words like tigress, volcano, animalesque, and out of control were used to describe her. Offscreen, she became known for a refusal of artificiality and an insistence on control over her own body. Symbolically, she became a rebellious body, struggling to free itself from the grip of political, masculine, foreign oppression.