Silvana Mangano

Silvana Mangano's cinema opened with Bitter Rice. Giuseppe De Santis's film about the women working the rice fields was social criticism and melodrama at once, and it made a Miss Italia contestant, still early in her youth, recognisable overnight; the sexuality of the part drew the criticism of the period as well. Soon afterwards she married the producer Dino De Laurentiis and went on choosing her work. Between the middle of her thirties and the middle of her forties she worked with two great directors of Italian cinema, appearing in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus Rex and Theorem and in Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice. In Theorem she is part of the crisis that a stranger arriving at the house opens up in every member of the family.