“My twin sister and my mother were survivors,” reflected the Italian actress Marisa Pavan, “and I feel I am too. I’m grateful for my past, for what I went through during the war … I’d say we were strong, definitely not weak.”
Although by nature an understated observer, that inner steel, which she found American girls her age did not have, stood her in good stead in the 1950s as she made her name in Hollywood films such as The Rose Tattoo.
It later enabled her to stand up to studio executives and to overcome the death of her fraternal twin, Anna Maria. Under the stage name Pier Angeli, she had become much the bigger star of the two, not least as the girlfriend of James Dean.
The sisters grew up in Rome, where during the latter stages of the war the family hid a former Italian general who was Jewish in their basement. Marisa was close to him and took his surname when she became an actress.
“There were times when we were bombed,” she remembered in an interview with Film Talk, “but we also saw children getting killed in the streets, and at times we didn’t have any food … Those experiences build a character and a personality.”
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One day in 1948, when they were 16, she and her sister were sent home because their teacher was ill. Walking along the Via Veneto, they passed the actor-director Vittorio De Sica. He was struck by Anna Maria’s beauty, and in short order she found fame first in Italy and then America, making her debut there in Teresa (1951).
After their father died, the family settled in Los Angeles. Marisa recalled she spoke no English and to create the impression that she did would drop into conversation phrases she had learnt, such as “How maudlin!” or “So gregarious!”
Cubby Broccoli, then an agent, knew the family. Marisa had no ambitions to act, but he organised a surprise audition for her when she visited the set of a John Ford film, What Price Glory (1952).
Marisa was required to sing a song in French. Another young actress was there trying out for the role, whom she later discovered was Anne Bancroft. Pavan was chosen for the part, however, as the love interest of an American marine, played by Robert Wagner.
Her sister tended to play wide-eyed ingénues, but Pavan’s style, wrote Angeli’s husband, the singer Vic Damone, was “quieter and more underplayed”. After appearing opposite Alan Ladd in Drum Beat (1954), she was cast in The Rose Tattoo (1955).
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Tennessee Williams had written his play for Pavan’s fellow Italian, Anna Magnani, to star in on Broadway, but she protested that she spoke no English. By the time it was adapted for the screen, she claimed she did. In fact, Pavan revealed, she learnt her lines phonetically. Nevertheless, Magnani’s performance as a widow whose passions are reawakened by Burt Lancaster’s truck driver brought her an Oscar.
Since she was in Italy at the time of the ceremony, Pavan accepted it on her behalf. She herself had been nominated for best supporting actress for playing the character’s daughter, Rosa, although she lost out to Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden. Pavan did, however, win the Golden Globe.
She found Williams, who cooked for her and taught her “to listen”, simpatico. Yet she was also witness on set to Magnani’s clashes with the director Daniel Mann. The volcanic diva took Pavan to task for following his instructions rather than hers.
Pavan next appeared as Catherine de Medici in Diane (1956). It was scripted by Christopher Isherwood, with Roger Moore as Catherine’s errant husband, Henri II of France, and Lana Turner in the titular role as his mistress.
Other roles followed in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), with Pavan as Gregory Peck’s wartime lover, and opposite Tony Curtis investigating the murder of a priest in The Midnight Story (1957).
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Her time in Hollywood came to an abrupt halt when cast as Abishag the Shunammite, biblical bedwarmer to the ageing King David, in King Vidor’s Solomon and Sheba (1959). Much to Pavan’s distress, Tyrone Power, its star, died with most of the shooting having been done. He was replaced by Yul Brynner and many of her scenes were cut.
Pavan was told that if she made a fuss, she would never work again. She was determined, however, not to be “a product”. “They did change my sister,” she said, “they made her up like a pin-up girl. I could wear a wig to play a certain part, but they could not change me in life.”
“I finished the film, and that was it. My film career was over.” She was comforted that the same thing had happened to another actress she admired, Luise Rainer. “She had been an individual like me — you know, they wanted to change my nose, they wanted to do this and that, and I said, ‘Either you take me as I am, or you don’t take me at all, all right?’”
She was born Maria Luisa Pierangeli in Cagliari in 1932. Anna Maria was by a few minutes the elder of the two. Sixteen years later, they would be joined by another sister, Patrizia, who also became an actress.
Their parents had met as children growing up in the Marche region, south of Urbino. Enrichetta was rather obsessed by showbusiness, while Luigi trained as an engineer. When the twins were born, the family was living in Sardinia, where he was working on a scheme to drain malarial swamps.
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They moved to Rome in 1935. Marisa remembered her father as a martinet, although her sister was his favourite. They were educated at the Torquato Tasso high school, but Marisa was petite and dreamt of being a ballerina.
In 1956 she married the French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont. His first wife, the actress Maria Montez, had died young, and he had been dating Grace Kelly when she met Prince Rainier of Monaco. Pavan and Aumont subsequently appeared together in John Paul Jones (1959), about the founder of America’s navy.
They had two sons, Jean-Claude, a cinematographer, and Patrick, now an art dealer. She and Aumont were divorced for a time in the 1960s, but then remarried. He died in 2001.
Her sister, who perhaps never got over her romance with Dean, was found dead from an overdose of barbiturates in 1971. She was 39. At the time she was in contention for a part in The Godfather.
Meanwhile, Pavan did find work in television, appearing in shows such as Hawaii Five-O. In a mini-series adapted from Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers (1975), she played the wife of the character portrayed by another of her sister’s former lovers, Kirk Douglas. Thereafter, Pavan largely lived in Provence.
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Looking back on her years in Hollywood, she was most fond of her performance as Catherine de Medici, as it let her show that she had real dramatic range. “What was important to me was the struggle to get the part,” she said. “When you get a part, and finally you are recognised, it is the most joyful moment you can have as an actress.”
Marisa Pavan, actress, was born on June 19, 1932. She died on December 6, 2023, aged 91
