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Anna Magnani and Toto star in Mario Monicelli’s 1960 film, The Passionate Thief, which is playing at TIFF Bell Lightbox until March 11.

It is hard to imagine the great Italian actress Anna Magnani as a mere face in the crowd but there she is, in the opening sequence of The Passionate Thief, playing an extra on a film set, just one of many spectators declaiming a biblical miracle.

Of course, her character's heartfelt cries of "Miraculo! Miraculo!" are more convincing than those of her colleagues and Tortorella is singled out for praise by the director before the shoot concludes and the exuberant extra hurries off to celebrate New Year's Eve. For all her anticipation, it quickly becomes clear that Tortorella's pretensions to fame and glamour are merely that as she scrambles to find a party to attach herself to, a crowd to impress with her sparkling dress and new blonde wig.

The Passionate Thief is one of the rarer offerings in TIFF's current retrospective of Magnani's films – it's not available on DVD – and it's a period piece, an early-sixties caper comedy. Looking for someone to squire her around, Tortorella teams up with an unemployed colleague, nicknamed Infortunio (and played by the classic Italian clown Toto). He can't seem to shake the handsome young Lello, an amorous sort who catches Tortorella's eye. But the joke is on her: Lello is actually a thief working the evening's parties and Infortunio is supposed to be receiving the stolen goods.

So, Magnani, famed for her high-octane dramatic roles, spends the movie playing a desperate middle-aged woman scampering after a younger man who is tricking her. What is notable is that the comic character does not lose her dignity; the actress's unbeatable combination of earthbound energy and soaring pride never abandons her. Tortorella may be deluded, Magnani is not.

Known as the volcano or La Lupa, the she-wolf, Magnani was beloved by Italians for the emotional authenticity with which she played a series of resilient working-class women. Peopled by the cunning and the downtrodden all scheming to get ahead in a post-Fascist state, The Passionate Thief offers a comic take on Italy after the war. The darker side was presented two years later in Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1962 melodramatic tragedy Mamma Roma: Magnani plays a former prostitute trying to make a living as a fruit seller in Rome to provide a better life for her teenage son, whose descent into crime will tear her apart.

It's not la dolce vita by any means. Plucked from the stage by the director Goffredo Alessandrini to make her start in Italian film in the 1930s, Magnani rose to fame in 1945 with Roberto Rossellini's masterpiece Rome, Open City, a wartime thriller set amongst the city's bombed buildings and struggling citizens. Magnani plays Pina, the pregnant fiancée of a resistance fighter, offering a luminous personification of courage and survival before the young woman meets an untimely end.

With her hourglass figure, her coarse black hair and her flashing eyes underlined by dark circles, the earthy Magnani seemed to embody a true Roman spirit from which the more conventionally beautiful stars of her day, a Gina Lollobrigida or a Monica Vitti, were well removed. She herself tired of the image – she is reported to have said she was bored stiff with "these everlasting parts as a hysterical, loud, working-class woman."

Indeed, by the time she had made it to Hollywood and was appearing in films such as The Secret of Santa Vittoria in 1969, her energy was threatening to become merely shrewish. There, in a plot about a town saving its wine stores from the Nazis, she plays the forceful wife to Anthony Quinn's wily peasant – and the film's most famous scene is the couple's brawl.

Still, her performances endure. Tennessee Williams considered her a muse and, once her English was good enough, cast her in The Rose Tattoo, the film adaptation of a play he had written with her in mind. Today, the 1955 drama feels as overripe as any other example of Williams's lesser work, and yet Magnani again maintains her dignity, this time playing a grieving widow discovering her late husband's infidelity. With its melodramatic portrait of the injured woman, the film itself could be accused of being hysterical but, at the centre of it, Magnani's emotions are so true she rises above the cliché to reach for tragedy.

Her final performance was in 1972 in Federico Fellini's Roma, that grand and fanciful salute to the city where she appears as herself in a brief cameo. The camera follows her down the street and stops at her door, the narrator suggesting to her that she is a living symbol of the city itself, of the sacred and the profane. She scoffs at the suggestion, declines an interview and bids Fellini a cheery goodnight. She died of pancreatic cancer the following year.

Volcano: The Films of Anna Magnani continues at the TIFF Bell Lightbox to March 11 (tiff.net)

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