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EXCLUSIVE: A biopic devoted to legendary Italian Rome, Open City and The Rose Tattoo actress Anna Magnani is in development at Indiana Production, the Milan and Rome-based company behind Netflix’s upcoming period drama The Leopard.
Entitled Anna, the production will be directed by Alessio Cremonini (On My Skin), who is also co-writing the screenplay with actress Olivia Magnani, grand-daughter of the late actress and daughter of her only son Luca Magnani.
The feature will focus on Magnani in a pivotal period of her life between the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the actress’s son was coming of age and she was embracing a new role as a mother in Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s 1962 drama Mamma Roma.
Filming for Anna is scheduled to begin in 2025, with casting in the early stages for the role of Magnani and the many other famous figures from Italy‘s film and artistic circles who crossed the actress’s path.
Having first achieved fame in Roberto Rossellini’s neo-realist 1945 classic Rome, Open City, Magnani rose to become one of Italy’s most important post-WWII actresses, also working with the director on L’Amore: The Human Voice and The Miracle and Volcano. Further career highlights in the early 1950s included Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima and Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach.
Magnani also spent time in Hollywood, winning an Oscar for her performance in The Rose Tattoo (1955), based on the play by Tennessee Wiliams; appearing opposite Anthony Quinn in George Cukor’s Wild Is The Wind (1957), for which she was also Oscar-nominated, and also co-starring in The Fugitive Kind (1960) with Marlon Brando.
Back in Italy, Magnani embarked on a new chapter in her career with her role as a prostitute determined to give her son a better life in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962).
In the backdrop to her work, the actress had a reputation as a free spirit, who raised her only son Luca Magnani on her own, having split from his actor father prior to his birth in 1942. She also challenged conventions around female roles, appearances and ageing, famously declaring: “As I get older, I don’t want to look younger, I want to look happier”.
In a release, Indiana Production said the film would be: “a journey through time without nostalgia, exploring what it means to be a modern actress and artist: an anti-diva, autonomous, irreverent. Always close to her audience. She was the first actress to break the barrier of being untouchable, leaping off the screen to stand among us.”
Cremonini made waves with his 2018 police brutality drama On My Skin, which played in Venice, with other credits including the female-focused Syria War set dramas Prophets and Border.
“Anna Magnani was not just an actress but a force of nature who rewrote the rules of cinema and female representation on the big screen. With this film, we want to portray her free and thoroughly modern soul,” said Cremonini.
Magnani will be tapping into her family’s extensive personal archives for the project which has the full support of her father.
“Imagining and writing this film is like trying to interpret and decipher the essence of a complex, deeply mysterious, and revolutionary actress, who helped broaden the horizons of men and women long before feminism,” she said.
Indiana Production co-head Fabrizio Donvito who is lead producer on the project said to the aim was to capture the life of “a woman who was extraordinary for her time”.
“She was totally free and independent and built a career and body of work that was exceptional for a woman at the time,” he said.
Recent feature film credits for Indiana Production include Elisa Fuksas’s Marko Polo, Giovanni Veronesi’s Romeo è Giuletta and Giorgio Diritti’s Lubo.
The company has also worked closely with a number of platforms in recent years on productions such as The Leopard, but Donvito says the ambition with Anna is to make a big cinematic film.
“Anna Magnani must be in the cinema, on the big screen, where she grew up,” he says.
