Italian actress’ most dramatic scene was a real-life confrontation with a love rival
Anna Maria Ferrero, who has died aged 84, never became an international star like her compatriots Sophia Loren or Claudia Cardinale, but during her heyday in the 1950s she was regarded as one of the most interesting and promising talents of Italian cinema. Yet the most dramatic episode of her career took place off-screen, if not out of the public eye.
In 1954, when she was 20, she was rehearsing Hamlet at the Carlo Felice theatre in Genoa, where she was to play Ophelia opposite Vittorio Gassman, then known as a compelling classical actor. Suddenly the Oscar-winning actress Shelley
Winters rushed on to the stage wielding a pair of scissors and made a beeline for Ferrero.
Winters and
Gassman had been married for two years, but were estranged. Three months earlier, less than a year after she had given birth to their only child, a tearful Winters had called a press conference in the United States. She had denounced Gassman for his absences, claimed that he had married her only to raise his profile, and announced that she would divorce him on condition that he married Ferrero.
Gassman responded with his own press conference, stating that he too wanted a divorce, but insisting that his rapport with Ferrero, a member of his theatre company, was purely professional. When Winters appeared in Genoa, it was Gassman who interposed himself between the two women.
Shortly after the divorce, he and Ferrero officially became a couple, and stayed together for seven years. They did not marry, and their relationship was stormy, marked by break-ups caused in part by her irritation at his abandoning the stage for the screen.
To those who knew Ferrero only from her films, the Winters scandal seemed out of her character. While Ferrero had quiet allure, she was usually cast as a shy ingenue or as the girl ill-served by more worldly men. Indeed, it was frustration with the similarity of the parts she was being offered that prompted her to turn to the stage. There she was able to show her range, in comedy, tragedy and even in musicals.
She appeared on television in Cime tempestose ( Wuthering Heights) and with Gassman in Othello and Hamlet. They also made half a dozen films, including Dino Risi’s Il mattatore ( Love and Larceny), which features a now-cherished scene in which Gassman’s con artist kisses Ferrero while he is disguised as Greta Garbo.
However, Ferrero remained underappreciated. In an era when Italy’s postwar revival was mirrored by the mounting curves of its film stars, it was perhaps her misfortune to be built on sleeker lines. Both her looks and capabilities were ahead of their day, but by the time it arrived she had quit acting.
She was born Anna Maria Guerra in Rome. When she was 14, she was walking near the Borghese Gardens as the director Claudio Gora was passing. He thought her perfect for a role he was casting. Her parents, who lived comfortably, opposed her wishes, and she chose her stage name in honour of her godfather, the orchestra director Willy Ferrero, who encouraged her. She made her debut in Gora’s Il cielo e rosso ( The Sky is Red), about children struggling to survive the wartime destruction of their city.
In 1959, she featured with Elsa Martinelli in a publicity stunt for La notte brava ( The Big Night), which led to them being photographed in clinging wet clothes in a fountain in Rome. The incident is said to have inspired Federico Fellini in La Dolce Vita.
That year, she met a little-known French actor at a party while he was filming in Rome. Jean Sorel’s looks would lead him to be compared to Alain Delon, while he was struck by the contrast between Ferrero’s sensitive face and her chatty manner.
She helped him to get roles and they appeared in two wartime dramas, L’oro di Roma ( Gold of Rome) and Le quattro giornate di Napoli ( The Four Days of Naples). In 1962, they were married. By then, with leads in films such as Il Gobbo ( The Hunchback), Ferrero’s career was at its height, but she turned her back on the business, aged 29.
‘‘She said that if we both stayed actors then within four years we would split up,’’ Sorel recalled. She lived quietly in Paris while he became a star, appearing in films such as The Day of the Jackal and Belle de Jour. Ferrero never gave interviews, but there were occasional hints that she regretted her choice.
‘‘There are two kinds of actors,’’ observed Sorel, who survives Ferrero. ‘‘Those who have talent and those who learn how to act. Anna Maria was the first kind . . . She had talent, creativity and didn’t take herself seriously. She mocked herself. And that’s what keeps those who do our job sane.’’ – The Times
In an era when Italy’s postwar revival was mirrored by the mounting curves of its film stars, it was perhaps her misfortune to be built on sleeker lines.