Silvana Mangano

Silvana Mangano — Biography

The daughter of an Italian father and an English mother, Silvana Mangano came into the world in Rome on 21 April 1930 and died in Madrid of lung cancer on 16 December 1989. After a childhood spent in wartime poverty, she spent seven years training as a dancer and worked as a model before a Miss Rome pageant win at sixteen, combined with a relationship with actor Marcello Mastroianni, carried her into her first film contract. A product of the neorealist generation, she rapidly emerged as one of Italy's most celebrated leading ladies and a glamour icon of her age.

She went on to work repeatedly with directors including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Alberto Lattuada and Vittorio De Sica, collecting three David di Donatello and two Nastro d'Argento awards along the way, and was still taking supporting roles in her fifties, in David Lynch's Dune and Nikita Mikhalkov's Dark Eyes. In 1949 she married producer Dino De Laurentiis; the couple had four children, Veronica, Raffaella and Federico among them, before separating in 1983 and entering formal divorce proceedings in 1988. Their son Federico died in a 1981 plane crash in Alaska, and Mangano herself was later laid to rest beside him at Pawling Cemetery outside New York City. In 2000 the city of Rome named a street after her.