She was better than Loren, who in turn became
the collective fantasy of the Italian woman.

Anna Magnani’s captivating performance in the masterpiece Rome, Open City, which celebrates its 80th anniversary this year, remains a remarkable role that made her one of Italy’s true movie stars.

“Magnani was better, but Sophia Loren is the collective fantasy of the Italian woman — the icon, the dream,” says acting professor Vito Mancusi. When asked whether he would prefer to dine with Loren or Magnani, he replies: “Sophia, of course. She would sit here gracefully enjoying the little clams, while Anna Magnani would ask, ‘Where have you taken me? What is this place? Is the food any good?’ She was difficult.”

Perhaps that’s one reason why some women today admire Magnani. They love how she boldly declared that the camera should not hide her wrinkles because “it took me my whole life to earn them.” She made the bags under her eyes sexy.

“She hated conventions, she was free — incredibly free,” says actress Olivia Magnani, Anna’s granddaughter, whose godfather was Roberto Rossellini. She grew up in the family home “where the Oscar stood on the shelf among letters from Bette Davis and Jean Cocteau.”

Magnani became the symbol of the strong, ordinary woman of the people. Her allure was noticed from another angle, too. Her first Hollywood film was based on a screenplay written especially for her by her close friend Tennessee Williams — The Rose Tattoo (1955). With that film, Anna Magnani became the first woman in Italian cinema history to win both the Oscar and the Golden Globe for Best Actress.

Marlon Brando was terrified of her. Meryl Streep called her a “goddess.” The New York Times described her as “superb” and “the tigress of the Italian screen.” And yet, many today are unfamiliar with “the undisputed queen of Italian cinema.”

Genuine and Sensual

Magnani is the central figure in Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), a milestone in film history whose 80th anniversary offers a moment to revisit this masterpiece.

Shot in January 1945 amid the ruins of World War II, the film is set during the “long winter” of Nazi occupation, between autumn 1943 and spring 1944. “Rossellini used expired film stock, stole cables from the Americans, filmed in basements and without permits — and yet he created a masterpiece,” says film historian Flavio De Bernardinis to the BBC.

Inspired by the real stories of two priests executed by the Nazis and co-written with Sergio Amidei, Alberto Consiglio, and a young Federico Fellini, Rome, Open City is a powerful depiction of the horrors of occupation and the courage of ordinary people. “It’s a political film. Its goal was to show a better Italy — not the fascist, colonialist Italy, but a country of good people,” says Caterina Capalbo, author of a book about the film. At the time, Mussolini and Hitler were still alive, so when the priest in the film utters the line, “What if they come back?” it expresses genuine fear shared by the cast and crew.

Pina (Magnani) is the moral compass of the film’s first half. A middle-aged widow, pregnant by her neighbor — a partisan she loves and plans to marry the next day — she is intelligent without education, poor yet generous, deeply just without being sanctimonious. She is portrayed with admiration, warmth, and realism — qualities rarely seen in cinema, then or now.

“At last, after years of cinema where everything was fake, perfect, and pretty, this was the story of a real woman — not wild, but someone who could be anyone,” her granddaughter Olivia comments.

A Cry for Affection

Anna Magnani’s life was never easy. Born on March 7, 1908, abandoned first by her father and later by her mother, she was raised by her maternal grandparents in the poorest neighborhoods of Rome. For a time, she studied declamation at the Santa Cecilia Academy, then began performing in cabarets and variety shows in nightclubs. She was discovered by director Goffredo Alessandrini, who later became her husband. Her film debut came in 1933, and in 1941 she played the lead in Teresa Venerdì by Vittorio De Sica.

“I realized I wasn’t born an actress,” she later wrote. “I simply decided to become one in my cradle, somewhere between one tear too many and one caress too few. All my life I screamed with everything I had for that tear, prayed for that caress.”

Immediate and Direct

When Rossellini chose her for Rome, Open City, Magnani was a cabaret performer — something like a stand-up comedian today. “Audiences in those theaters were brutal. They threw dead cats at bad actors,” says De Bernardinis. The dead cats, he insists, are not a metaphor — people literally picked them up from the street. That’s how Magnani learned to act for an audience. “Watch Marlon Brando beside her in The Fugitive Kind from the 1960s — he’s aware of the camera, searching for the light, performing his grimaces. Magnani doesn’t care; she’s raw and direct. She goes straight to the audience.”

Many scenes in Rome, Open City were shot in a single take — there wasn’t enough film for more. Magnani said they never rehearsed the iconic scene in which Pina runs after the Nazi van taking away her lover Francesco and is shot in the back. “With Rossellini, there was no rehearsal,” she told Arianna magazine in 1970. “He created the scene. I walked out that door and… I was transported back to the time when young men were being taken away. Suddenly I felt I wasn’t myself — I was Pina.”

Less than a year earlier, Teresa Gullace, six months pregnant and mother of five, had been shot in Rome by a Nazi soldier while waving to her captured husband. In the film, Francesco cries “Teresa” in tribute. Around the same time, Magnani herself was suffering — her son had fallen ill with polio.

The Unconventional Star

Magnani — and the raw pain she brought to the screen — may be one reason she’s less popular in the U.S. today than other iconic Italian actresses. “Anna embodied a country that emerged from war with the courage to show its wounds,” says De Bernardinis. “Soon after, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, and other maggiorate (‘voluptuous actresses’) represented an Italy eager to forget the war — colorful, lush, thriving.”

Rome, Open City became Italy’s highest-grossing film that year and the first non-American film to earn over $1 million in the U.S. The American press adored it. The New York Times wrote that Magnani had “the ability to cry real tears, to laugh real laughter, to fight fiercely — thunderous in anger, sumptuously sensual in love.” Tennessee Williams tried to persuade her to star in his new Broadway play — one of many American offers she declined. “That woman, Anna Magnani, she digs her nails into your heart,” he said.

Her final film was Federico Fellini’s Roma. Anna Magnani died on September 26, 1973, at age 65, in her beloved Rome. In one interview she said about death:

“Of course I’m afraid. I think about it constantly — about death. It’s unfair to die once you’ve been born. To die means to end. Why must we end?”