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The most explosive emotional actress of her generation had. in fact, erupted over filmland and was filling the vicinity with temperamental lava, flaming ash and general consternation. Soon after her arrival in the U.S., Magnani banished the TV set from her hotel room and ordered a grand piano, on which she battered tempestuously when the mood was on her. Bored with the chef's chef-d'oeuvres. she was seen marching up to her suite with $50 worth of groceries in tow. She gave interviews from her bed, her hair like a black dustmop, her bag-rimmed eyes like the burning tips of cigars. Sometimes she actually lit up a small cigar and slunk about the room, her Magnanimous bosom heaving like a passionate surf as she flung out a flood of Italian. When informed that her first U.S. picture would be shown on widescreen, Magnani publicly sneered: "Poof! Widescreen!" When TV came with opulent offers, she recoiled: "Weel I have to hold a bowl of cereal een my hand?"
Anna Magnani had sharpened her passions on a flinty fate. She was born about 47 years ago and brought up on the wrong side of the Tiber. Her mother was a working girl and her father did a fade when Anna was a month old. At 17, she won admission to a dramatic school, and soon joined a rundown roadshow as a singer of stornelli, the street songs of a country where the streets are seldom cleaned.
The movies caught her up in the mid-'30s. and in the next ten years she made about a dozen pictures—all of them bad most of them popular, some of them good experience. By 1944, when Roberto Rossellini offered her the lead in Open City Magnam had developed a style that was to set the acting fashion in Italy from that day to this. She called it realismo and overnight the narrow highways and byways of Italy were crowded with "Ma-gnamni," who frumped their hair down over their eyes, ripped a few strategic seams m their cheap cotton prints and generally made a sensual virtue of postwar economic necessity.