A pure passion play

Revered almost as much as the Pope, the feisty Fifties film star Anna Magnani became the muse of Tennessee Williams. Now, they're reunited on stage in a revealing drama

The famously tempestuous actress Anna Magnani was often unlucky in love - her marriage was unhappy, a lover left her soon after she gave birth to his son, and her greatest passion, the director Roberto Rossellini, threw her over for Ingrid Bergman. In contrast, the love of Magnani's public knew no bounds. While she was queen of the Italian cinema, there were two photographs one could expect to find in every Roman café - hers and the Pope's. Vittorio de Sica called her the "finest actress in Italy"; Luchino Visconti thought her a "stupendous" one; and Jean Renoir, with whom she made The Golden Coach (1953), said she was "the greatest actress I have ever worked with... an animal created for the stage and screen."

The high regard of her fans was more than appreciation of her talent: with Rossellini's Roma, Città Aperta (Open City), a physically and emotionally violent film that launched the neo-realist movement, Magnani came to symbolise her beloved Rome. She managed, said Alberto Moravia, "to do something that all too rarely happens in the often improvised world of film and theatre - that is, to fuse her own meteoric trajectory with the mysterious and controversial orbit of that comet called... history".

One of the most important men in Magnani's life, however, was neither a lover nor an Italian. For many years, she was not only a friend but a muse to Tennessee Williams, who called her "a great, great person," and referred to the years he knew her as "that golden time".

Their friendship has now been commemorated in Roman Nights, a two-hander by Franco D'Alessandro that, when presented off Broadway two years ago, was described as having a dybbuk-like possession of its characters' souls. After its run at the New End Theatre, where the roles will be played by Nolan Hemmings and Franca Barchiesi, it will play Rome, Prague and Moscow.

D'Alessandro, 36, an American who has lived in Italy, "fell in love at first sight" with Magnani when his father took him to her movies. So did his play's other character when he saw her in Open City, the film that introduced her, in 1945, to American audiences. Slightly plump, with a broad face and dishevelled black hair, the earthy Magnani was a revelation to moviegoers accustomed to glossy Hollywood perfection. Born in 1908, the illegitimate child of a Roman mother and Egyptian father, she was brought up by a grandmother who sent her to a convent school. Magnani soon realised, however, that her larger-than-life emotions belonged on stage. She performed bawdy numbers in cabarets, and appeared in variety and in popular low-comic plays, then in Italian films of the Thirties and Forties.

In the last weeks of the German occupation, Rossellini cast her and Aldo Fabrizi, both of whom had always played working-class comic characters, in Roma, Città Aperta. Filmed while Italians were still being killed in sporadic bursts of sniper fire from diehard Nazis, the film astonished audiences with its rough, raw look (many believed it to be a documentary) and its direct assault on the emotions. (Because of the contrast with Magnani's previous roles, the film was especially powerful for Italians, as it replicated what had just happened in their lives, showing cheerful people suddenly facing brutality and death.) While Magnani's face was mobile and intense (David Thomson described it as "ecstatically wounded"), she embodied resistance, countering, for instance, a joyous expression with a defensive twist of her shoulders. As Williams says, "She sinks the claws in the heart."

Magnani played Pina, a pregnant widow who is about to marry her lover when the Nazis arrest him. As the van taking him away drives off, she runs after it, screaming defiance, and, in front of her son, is shot down. As she falls onto the cobblestones, her skirt rides up to show bare thigh above black stocking, a gruesome context for a traditional symbol of sauciness. The van turns the corner, and is ambushed by the partisans, who free her lover, minutes too late.

Ironically, this heart-rending scene was inspired by a low-comic one witnessed by the screenwriter, Sergio Amidei. Filming had already started when he, standing outside one of the buildings they were using, heard a flaming row between Magnani and the actor Massimo Serato, the father of her real-life son. Serato then came running out and jumped into a truck, shouting at one of the crew to drive him away. A minute later, Magnani appeared, waving her arms and alight with rage, and bawled, "You son-of-a-bitch!" and variations thereon while Serato scooted away.

When Tennessee Williams saw the movie, he wanted to write a part for Magnani. He ended up writing two, Serafina, the ravenously sensual widow in The Rose Tattoo, and Lady in Orpheus Descending. (She also influenced the part of Alexandra Del Lago, the movie star in Sweet Bird of Youth). Williams' association with Magnani, D'Alessandro says, enabled him to move beyond his portrayals of neurotic, self-deceiving Southern women. "It was not until their friendship that the female characters in his plays began to blossom into fiery, sensuous women." Williams pleaded with Magnani to play Serafina and Lady on Broadway, but at that time theatrical managements demanded that stars remain in their roles for at least six months, and she did not want to leave her son who had polio for that length of time. But she did play Serafina, opposite Burt Lancaster, in the film of The Rose Tattoo (1955), copping a Best Actress Oscar for her first American movie, and Lady, with Marlon Brando, in a film version of Orpheus, The Fugitive Kind (1959). Magnani's other memorable roles were the name part of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962), a prostitute who sacrifices herself in vain for her grown son, and in both of the short films that made up L'Amore (1948). Only half of Rossellini's two-parter was seen in the US, however - Magnani's tour de force as the woman on the telephone in Cocteau's La Voix Humaine. The other story, The Miracle, was banned - it sent the Catholic censorship board, The Legion of Decency, into fits with its portrayal of a mentally disturbed peasant girl who becomes pregnant after being raped, and believes she is giving birth to the Christ child.

Roman Nights spans the entire period of Williams and Magnani's relationship, from their meeting in 1949 until her death, in 1973. In creating their conversations, D'Alessandro, who examined the archives at Cinecitta and interviewed Magnani's relatives, has used quotations from the couple's diaries and letters and from Williams' memoirs. In one striking exchange, Williams asks, "Why do some women have children, and then destroy them?" - a question he once addressed, while "totally out of my mind" to his own mother. Here he gets an answer: Magnani says, "As revenge against the men who destroyed them." Williams reminisces about the time he spent living in the Hotel Elysee in New York, which he has nicknamed the Hotel Easy Lay. We see Magnani raging against Stanley Kramer and the crass script for his film The Secret of Santa Vittoria, which in 1968 ended her career with a role that was a grotesque caricature of her screen persona. Afterwards, she returned to the stage with Medea, appearing on screen again only in a cameo, as herself, in Fellini's Roma (1972).

After the Fifties, Magnani was eclipsed by Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, who while also busty and tempestuous, were slimmer and more stylish, sexy rather than maternal. Williams suffered as well in this period from his increasing dependence on drink and drugs, and from the hostile reception of his new plays. But each cheered the other up, or at least provided distraction. To Williams, Magnani was a heartening contrast to the most important women in his life, his censorious steel butterfly of a mother and his gentle but unstable sister, Rose, whom his mother subjected to a lobotomy. Magnani, he said, "was beyond convention as no one I've known in my life." Indeed. She once opened the door to him singing and dancing, wearing only a pair of transparent panties.

When in Rome, Williams would call at her penthouse at eight o'clock, to begin a night of drinking, driving, drinking, dining, exercising her dog (he would run alongside the car), drinking, and animal charity. She would demand a huge bag of leftovers from the restaurant, and drive round the Forum, the Colosseum, the Villa Borghese, feeding the stray cats. They would be accompanied by one of the lovers half her age whom Magnani impetuously picked up and just as suddenly discarded, who would sulk in silence until they returned home. "Evenings are devoted to Anna," wrote Williams in one of his Roman diaries, "and greater love (or is it endurance?) hath no man."

Though Williams, with his breakdowns, was seemingly the more fragile of the two, he was, says D'Alessandro, the more disciplined, and, being able to create on his own, the more independent. "His influence on Magnani was perseverance, tenacity. He wrote every day of his life, and never stopped revising. I think that at many points in her life Magnani felt desperate, and was inspired by the way Tennessee, every time he got knocked down, would get up again. He could take a dark subject and make it funny - she needed someone who could show her the humour in the sorrow."

Williams' last gift to Magnani - one that stood out even at the Roman orgy of sentiment that was her funeral - was twenty dozen roses. "Do you know why?" says D'Alessandro. "It was his way of referring to those evenings. In Italy people use the 24-hour clock, so, at the end of one their marathons, she would say, 'Ci vediamo alle venti' - 'See you at twenty'."

'Roman Nights', New End Theatre, London NW3 (0870 033 2733) tomorrow to 11 December