[2] Playwright Tennessee Williams became an admirer of her acting and wrote The Rose Tattoo (1955) specifically for her to star in, a role for which she received an Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first Italian – and first non-native English speaking woman – to win an Oscar.

[4] As an actress, she became recognized for her dynamic and forceful portrayals of "earthy lower-class women"[5] in such films as L'Amore (1948), Bellissima (1951), The Rose Tattoo (1955), The Fugitive Kind (1960) and Mamma Roma (1962).

However, her actor friend Micky Knox writes that she "never studied acting formally" and started her career in Italian music halls singing traditional Roman folk songs.

"[11] Film critic David Thomson wrote that Magnani was considered an "outstanding theatre actress" in productions of Anna Christie and The Petrified Forest.

Magnani gained international renown as Pina in Roberto Rossellini's neorealist Rome, Open City (Roma, città aperta, 1945).

In a film about Italy's final days under German occupation during World War II, Magnani's character dies fighting to protect her husband, an underground fighter against the Nazis.

Life wrote "in an atmosphere crackling with rivalry... Reporters were accredited, like war correspondents, to one or the other of the embattled camps...Partisanship infected the Via Veneto (boulevard in Rome), where Magnaniacs and Bergmaniacs clashed frequently."

[15] Magnani then went on to star as Camille (stage name: Columbine) in Jean Renoir's film The Golden Coach (Le Carrosse d'or, 1952).

It co-starred Burt Lancaster, and was Magnani's first English-speaking role in a mainstream Hollywood movie, winning her the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Lancaster, who played the role of a "lusty truck driver", said, "if she had not found acting as an outlet for her enormous vitality, she would have become a great criminal".

She never exhibited any lack of self-assurance, any timidity in her relations with that society outside of whose conventions she quite publicly existed...[s]he looked absolutely straight into the eyes of whomever she confronted and during that golden time in which we were dear friends, I never heard a false word from her mouth.

[19] When her name was announced as the Oscar winner, an American journalist called her in Rome to tell her the news; he had difficulty convincing her he wasn't joking.

She then appeared in another Tennessee Williams property, the 1960 film The Fugitive Kind, which originally was titled Orpheus Descending after the play on which it was based).

Directed by Sidney Lumet, she co-starred with Marlon Brando, for whom this also was a reunion with Williams, whose A Streetcar Named Desire vaulted him to stardom.

In an article he wrote for Life, Williams discussed why he chose Magnani for the part:"Anna and I had both cherished the dream that her appearance in the part I created for her in The Fugitive Kind would be her greatest triumph to date...She is simply a rare being who seems to have about her a little lightning-shot cloud all her own...In a crowded room, she can sit perfectly motionless and silent and still you feel the atmospheric tension of her presence, its quiver and hum in the air like a live wire exposed, and a mood of Anna's is like the presence of royalty.

In Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962), Magnani is both the mother and the whore, playing an irrepressible prostitute determined to give her teenaged son a respectable middle-class life.

Mamma Roma, while one of Magnani's critically acclaimed films, was not released in the United States until 1995, deemed too controversial 33 years earlier.

[22] In one of her last film roles, The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969), she co-starred with Anthony Quinn, with whom she had appeared with a decade before in Wild is the Wind.

They played husband and wife in what Life called "perhaps the most memorable fight since Jimmy Cagney smashed Mae Clarke in the face with a half a grapefruit."

"[3] Her style does not display the more obvious attributes of the female star, with neither her face or physical makeup being considered "beautiful", wrote Wood.

Directed by George Cukor, "the American cinema's greatest director of actresses," he was able to draw out the "individual essence" of Magnani's "sensitive and inward performance.

After they married, she retired from full-time acting to "devote herself exclusively to her husband", although she continued to play smaller film parts.

Magnani had a love affair with actor Massimo Serato, by whom she had her only child, a son named Luca,[8] who was born on 29 October 1942 in Rome, after her separation from Alessandrini.

She was provisionally laid to rest in the family mausoleum of Roberto Rossellini; but then subsequently interred in the Cimitero Comunale of San Felice Circeo in southern Lazio.