Italian postcard by Bromofoto, Milano, no. 669. Photo: Minerva Film. Silvana Pampanini in Un giorno in pretura / A Day in Court (Steno, 1954).
Italian diva Silvana Pampanini (1925-2016) enjoyed enormous popularity in the 1950s and 1960s. In the early 1950s, before Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida reached stardom, Pampanini was one of the most well-known symbols of Italian beauty.
Born in Rome to a family that had moved there from the Veneto some three centuries ago, Silvana Pampanini got her law degree during the war and visited the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia, where she got a degree in piano and song. As a singer, the young Pampanini made a career in entertainment music; not only were her songs widespread on unique records, but she also got an audience with Pope Pio XII. Over the years, she was also a frequent visitor to the opera seasons. Her cousin was the soprano Rosetta Pampanini. When the war was over, her singing master inscribed her for the Miss Italia contest in Stresa in September 1946, which she won ex aequo with Rossana Martini, thanks to a fierce audience reaction after the jury had originally chosen Martin. Her Miss Italia title was her introduction to a career in cinema, and from the film L’Apocalisse (Giuseppe Maria Scottese, 1946), Pampanini performed in various films, often musicals. She also became the toast of weeklies and film magazines. Her father, who originally had been against his daughter having a career as an actress, became her agent. Even if she was dubbed in her first roles, Pampanini became a star, performing with all the great actors of postwar cinema: Totò, Peppino De Filippo, Alberto Sordi, Vittorio De Sica, Marcello Mastroianni, Nino Manfredi, Vittorio Gassman, Walter Chiari, Amedeo Nazzari, Renato Rascel, Raf Vallone, Nino Taranto, Massimo Girotti, Ugo Tognazzi, Carlo Dapporto, Paolo Stoppa, Rossano Brazzi, Massimo Serato, Folco Lulli, Aroldo Tieri, Carlo Campanini. Among her foreign film partners were Jean Gabin, Henri Vidal, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Raymond Pellegrin, Pierre Brasseur, Curd Jurgens, Pedro Armendariz and even Buster Keaton.
In the 1950s, Silvana Pampanini played in one film after another, and many of her films were distributed worldwide. Well known was, for instance, the Dino de Laurentiis production I pompieri di Viggiù (Mario Mattoli 1949), which Ennio Flaiano considered rather a series of vaudeville acts than a film, and thus preceding TV vaudeville. With the Quo vadis? parody OK Nerone (Mario Soldati 1951), Pampanini had her first international success as Empress Poppea, opposite Gino Cervi as Nero, and Walter Chiari and Carlo Campanini as two American sailors who dream they are in Nero’s Rome. In the romantic comedy Bellezze in bicicletta (Carlo Campogalliani, 1951), she formed a pair with Delia Scala and sang one of the most beloved songs of the time: 'Bellezza in bicicletta'. In 1952, Pampanini performed in the much-awarded Processo alla città (Luigi Zampa), starring Amedeo Nazzari; La presidentessa (Pietro Germi), based on a French pochade; and La tratta delle bianche/White Slave Trade (Luigi Comencini). The latter also cast Eleonora Rossi-Drago, Tamara Lees and (in a smaller part) Sophia Loren. Still, the leading men, Vittorio Gassman and Marc Lawrence, both have set their eyes on Silvana. In 1953, Pampanini played in an episode of Un giorno in pretura (Steno) for which her makeup man transformed her into a lady 30 years older. That year, she was also the title character Anna Zaccheo in Giuseppe de Santis’ Un marito per Anna Zaccheo, which costarred Nazzari and Massimo Girotti. In 1955, Pampanini performed in the comedy La bella di Roma by Luigi Comencini, which co-starred Alberto Sordi and Paolo Stoppa, and she played in the box office hit Racconti Romani (Gianni Franciolini), based on a story by Alberto Moravia, and starring Franco Fabrizi. Finally, Pampanini played in La strada lunga un anno (1958) by Giuseppe De Santis, an Italian-Yugoslav coproduction, an Oscar candidate in 1959 and a Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign Picture.
Even if she went to America, Silvana Pampanini refused to act in Hollywood, presumably because her English was not good enough, but she did play in France, where she was known as Niní Pampan. Examples are La tour de Nesle (Abel Gance 1955) in which she played Marguerite de Bourgogne opposite Pierre Brasseur as Jehan Buridan, and La loi des rues (Ralph Habib 1956), with Raymond Pellegrin. She also played in films in Spain, Germany, Greece, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Argentine, and in particular Mexico, where she played in some films that never were released in Italy, such as Sed de amor (Alfonso Corona Blake 1959) with Pedro Armendariz, and Napoleoncito (Gilberto Martinez Solares, 1964). In the meantime, the yellow press published photos of Pampanini with Prince Ahmad Shah Khan, Tyrone Power, William Holden, George DeWitt, Omar Sharif, Orson Welles, King Faruq of Egypt and others. Pampanini herself told how her one true love, a man ten years older than she, not involved in the cinema and never identified, died of a disease one month before their wedding. After some short experience as a director and screenwriter in 1958, Pampanini slowed down her film career and focused on radio and TV, where she worked as an announcer and host of manifestations. In 1964, Dino Risi directed her in Il Gaucho, a partly autobiographical film in which Silvana played a declining diva who pathetically searches for her lost glory and for a millionaire to marry. In 1966, after twenty years of career, Pampanini quit cinema to assist her ageing parents, whom she took care of till their death. She returned for one last role as a prostitute in an episode of Mazzabubù... Quante corna stanno quaggiù? (Mariano Laurenti, 1971). After that, she was only visible once more as herself in Tassinaro (1983) by Alberto Sordi.
Silvana Pampanini regularly appeared on television from 1951 on, so from the very first emissions on. In 1956, she launched the debuting wizard Silvan, to whom she gave his stage name. Her only piece of television prose for RAI was a comedy by Gustave Flaubert in 1971. In the Mediaset mini-series Tre stelle (1999), she had a bit part as the old mother of Alba Parietti, and in Fall 2002, she was part of the cast of Domenica In for two months. Pampanini is devoted to Padre Pio and San Antonio; she never married nor had any children, though she was proud that once Totò proposed to her, on the set of 47 morto che parla (Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia 1950), even if he asked in vain. For decades, Pampanini claimed the torch song 'Malafemmena' was dedicated to her, but in reality, it was inspired by the divorced wife of the Neapolitan comic, as has been indicated by Toto’s daughter and a document of the SIAE. Though living in Monaco, Pampanini was nominated “Grande ufficiale dell'ordine al merito della Repubblica Italiana” in 2003 by president Ciampi. In September 2009, she returned to the Venice Film Festival for the projection of the restored version of Noi cannibali (1953) by Antonio Leonviola, a film inserted in the section Questi fantasmi 2, dedicated to Italian films to be reconsidered. Silvana played a chorus line girl who was pestered by men making passes at her. In the same year (2009), the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar declared in an interview that Pampanini was one of the Italian actresses with whom he’d like to do a film. In her roaring years, Pampanini was not very beloved by the critics, and she did not receive important awards, which caused her in her autobiography of 1996, 'Scandalosamente perbene', to compare herself with Greta Garbo. Pampanini never was afraid to keep still, so in December 2006, she publicly mocked Gina Lollobrigida for marrying a man much younger than she, and in 2008, when Mayor Walter Veltroni did not invite her to the Festa del Cinema in Rome, she started a serious polemic. In 2007, she participated in the festivities of 70 years of Cinecittà, and in 2009, she hosted the Mostra del Cinema dello Stretto, which brought a warm welcome and recognition of her career.
Sources: Wikipedia (Italian and English) and IMDb.
“Ma dove vai bellezza in bicicletta,
così di fretta pedalando con ardor?
Le gambe snelle tornite e belle
m'hanno già messo la passione dentro al cuor!”
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