Anna Magnani - Personal Life

Personal Life

She married her first film director, Goffredo Alessandrini, in 1935, two years after he discovered her on stage. After they married, she retired from full-time acting to "devote herself exclusively to her husband", although she continued to play smaller film parts. They separated in 1942.

Magnani had a love affair with the actor Massimo Serato, by whom she had her only child, a son named Luca. Magnani's life was struck by tragedy when Luca, who was born after her separation from Alessandrini, came down with crippling polio at only 18 months of age. He never regained use of his legs. As a result, she spent most of her early earnings for specialists and hospitals. After once seeing a legless veteran drag himself along the sidewalk, she said, "I realize now that it's worse when they grow up", and resolved to earn enough to "shield him forever from want".

In 1945 she fell in love with director Roberto Rossellini while working on Roma, Cittá Aperta (AKA Rome, Open City (1945). "I thought at last I had found the ideal man... e had lost a son of his own and I felt we understood each other. Above all, we had the same artistic conceptions." Rossellini had become violent, volatile and possessive, and they argued constantly about films or out of jealousy. "In fits of rage they threw crockery at each other." As artists, however, they complemented each other well while working on neorealist films. Eventually he promised to direct her in a film he was preparing which he told her would be "the crowning vehicle of her career". However, when the screenplay was completed, he instead gave the role for Stromboli to a Swedish star of U.S. films, Ingrid Bergman, which resulted in Magnani's permanent breakup with Rossellini.

As a result, Magnani took on the starring role of Volcano, which was said to have been deliberately produced to invite comparison: both films were shot in similar locales of Aeolian Islands only 12 miles apart; both actresses played independent-minded roles in a neorealist fashion; and both films were shot simultaneously. Life magazine wrote, "... in an atmosphere crackling with rivalry... Reporters were accredited, like war correspondents, to one or the other of the embattled camps.... Partisanship infected the Via Veneto (boulevard in Rome), where Magnaniacs and Bergmaniacs clashed frequently." However, Magnani still considered Rossellini the "greatest director she ever acted for".

Magnani was superstitious and consulted astrologers, as well as believing in numerology. She also claimed to be clairvoyant. Magnani had a stranger quirk still in her love of defleaing street kittens with her thumbnails. She ate and drank very little and could subsist for long periods on nothing more than black coffee and cigarettes. However, these habits often affected her sleep: "My nights are appalling," she said. "I wake up in a state of nerves and it takes me hours to get back in touch with reality." During Benito Mussolini's rule, Magnani was known to make rude jokes about the Italian Fascist Party.