Mangano, Silvana

(1930-1989)

   Actress. One of the first of the so-called maggiorate, 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 in Giuseppe De Santis's Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949). In the same year she married producer Dino De Laurentiis in 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 as Alberto Lattuada's Anna (1951), in which she played a troubled nightclub singer who eventually becomes a nun, and Mario Camerini's Ulisse (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 in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, 1966) and Teorema (Theorem, 1968) and Luchino Visconti's Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1968), Ludwig (1972), and Gruppo 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 friend Marcello Mastroianni), in Nikita Mikhalkov's Oci ciornie (Dark Eyes, 1987), following which she retired to battle a long, and eventually fatal, illness.