Raised in poverty during World War II, Mangano trained as a dancer and worked as a model before winning a Miss Rome beauty pageant in 1946.

Born in Rome to an Italian father and an English mother (Ivy Webb from Croydon), Mangano lived in poverty during World War II.

The contest that year became a springboard for a pool of potential actresses, including the winner Lucia Bosé, Mangano, and several other future stars of Italian cinema such as Gina Lollobrigida, Eleonora Rossi Drago and Gianna Maria Canale.

This led her to a film contract, though it took some time for Mangano to ascend to international stardom with her performance in Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro, Giuseppe De Santis, 1949).

[1] Although she never had an international career to match her contemporaries Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, Mangano remained a favorite star between the 1950s and 1970s, appearing in Anna (Alberto Lattuada, 1951), L'oro di Napoli (Vittorio De Sica, 1954), Mambo (Robert Rossen, 1955), Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968), Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971), The Scientific Cardplayer (Luigi Comencini, 1972), and Ludwig (Luchino Visconti, 1973).

Although it was sung by Flo Sandon's, Silvana Mangano was credited on the record label of "El Negro Zumbón", which is from the soundtrack of the film Anna (1951) and was a hit song in 1953.