Background
Silvana Mangano was born on 21 April 1930 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.
Silvana Mangano was born on 21 April 1930 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.
She had been trained as a dancer and performed with a rough, erotic energy in that film.
The gap between Italian neo-realism and the striving after international markets that dominated Cinecitta in the 1950s is straddled by the magnificent thighs of the teenage Silvana Mangano in Bitter Rice (49, Giuseppe de Santis). The social comment of that film was swamped by its popular elements, chief of which was Mangano, her skirts tucked up, standing in the rice fields.
She had made two films— Delitto di Giovanni Episcopo (47, Alberto Lattuada) and LElisir d'Amore (48, Mario Costa)—but Bitter Rice was a vast hit, and in 1949 she married its producer Dino de Laurentiis.
That was enough to assure her of a place as a leading Italian actress, but tor some fiiteen years she was overshadowed—by Lollobrigida and Loren, her reluctance to go to America, and the nagging thought that the boss’s wife need be no great actress. However, after 1966, she became a leading actress for Pier Paolo Pasolini and proved more beautiful in middle age than ever she was in that paddy field: Black Magic (49, Gregory Ratoff); Il Brigante Musolino (50, Mario Camerini); Anna (51, Lattuada); Mambo (54, Robert Rossen); Gold of Naples (54, Vittorio de Sica); as Penelope in Ulysses (55, Camerini); Uomini e Lupi (56, de Santis); Tempest (57, Lattuada); The Sea Wall (58, René Clement); Five Branded Women (60, Martin Hitt); La Grande Guerra (60, Mario Monicelli); Crimen (60, Camerini); Una Vita Difficile (61, Dino Risi); Il Giudizio Universale (61, de Sica); Barabbas (62, Richard Fleischer); II Processo di Verona (62, Carlo Lizzani); in two episodes, directed by Mauro Bolognini and Luigi Comencini, from La Mia Signora (64); II Disco Volante (65, Tinto Brass); in Le Streghe (66, Luchino Visconti, Bolognini, Pasolini, and de Sica); Oedipus Bex (67, Pasolini); Theorem (68, Pasolini); Medea (69, Pasolini); Death in Venice (71, Visconti); The Decameron (71, Pasolini); Conversation Piece (75, Visconti); Dune (84, David Lynch); and Dark Eyes (87, Nikita Mikhalkov).