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Magnani, however, was much more than a manner. What she seemed she was: an earthy, emotional Eve with lusty appetites. Her private life was a steaming contusion. In 1935 she married Goffredo Aiessandnm, a movie director. One day she trailed him to a rendezvous with another woman, hinted her displeasure by ramming her car into his. They were separated. Anna loves her son Luca now 13 and stricken with polio, with a fierce protective passion that motivates much of her acting. She is grimly determined to leave him rich when she dies, and she probably will: under the soft schedule of Italian taxes, her take-home pay over the last ten years has been tremendous For several years in the '40s Anna kept company with Director Roberto Rosselmi, and the incidental breakage was impressive. Crockery flew and so did curses frequently in public. Once, when Roberto displeased her. Anna cleared a restaurant table with one queenly swipe of her forearm. When he left her for Ingrid Bergman, Magnani sulked in her flat. "I am a desperate woman," she announced. "When 1 suffer, I must suffer until my heart breaks." Nevertheless, Anna quickly sublimated sorrow into art. What another actress must grasp with her intelligence Magnani has in her blood. "Myself," she says, "I have so much boiling inside I had to become an actress. If I had not L think I could have become a great criminal."
