MANGANO, SILVANA

(1930-1989)

Actress. One of the first of the so-calledmaggiorate, or generously proportioned starlets of Italian postwar cinema, Mangano (Miss Rome, 1946) had been a model and had played small supporting parts in a number of minor films before skyrocketing to international stardom as the feisty, black-stockinged rice worker inGiuseppe De Santis'sRiso amaro(Bitter Rice, 1949). In the same year she married producerDino De Laurentiisin a civil ceremony and subsequently had four children by him before seeking a legal separation in 1983. (Their son Federico died in a plane accident in 1981.)

Although De Laurentiis sought to exploit Mangano's strongly erotic image in the early 1950s in films such asAlberto Lattuada'sAnna(1951), in which she played a troubled nightclub singer who eventually becomes a nun, andMario Camerini'sUlisse(Ulysses, 1954), in which she played both Circe and Penelope, Mangano would earn a much more exalted and enduring reputation for the ethereal, almost abstract, femininity that she came to exemplify in the mother figures she played inPier Paolo Pasolini'sEdipo re(Oedipus Rex, 1966) andTeorema(Theorem, 1968) andLuchino Visconti'sMorte a Venezia(Death in Venice, 1968),Ludwig(1972), andGruppo di famiglia in un interno(Conversation Piece, 1974).Always more interested in her family than in international stardom, she chose her roles very carefully in the later part of her career and drastically reduced her screen appearances to a minimum. Her last role was as Elisa, the wife of Romano (played by her friendMarcello Mastroianni), in Nikita Mikhalkov'sOci ciornie(Dark Eyes, 1987), following which she retired to battle a long, and eventually fatal, illness.