Il Sud di Tennessee Williams e Anna Magnani a Hollywood

This paper looks at the Hollywood movies that starred Anna Magnani as the protagonist, focusing on The Rose Tattoo (Daniel Mann, 1955), to understand how the actress’s unique performative style contributed to a renewal of dramatic patterns and acting roles for women in the U.S. film industry. Magnani’s success in Hollywood was partly the result of her encounter with Tennessee Williams (author of the plays from which the films had been adapted), whose contemporary experiments and poetic innovations on the stage would shape a peculiar transnational/transcultural South that was the privileged setting and subject of his cinematic imagination.