Actress. She gained fame as an Italian actress, receiving the 1955 Academy Award for Best Actress. Raised in poverty by her maternal grandmother in Rome after her unmarried mother abandoned her, she worked her way through Rome's Academy of Dramatic Art by singing in cabarets and nightclubs. She then began touring the countryside with small repertory companies. Although she had a small role in a silent film in the late 1920s, she was not known as a film actress until 1941's "Teresa Venerdi," directed by Vittorio DiSica. Her breakthrough film was Roberto Rossellini's "Open City" in 1945, generally regarded as the first commercially successful Italian "neorealist" film of the postwar years. This film gained her an international fame. From then on, she never stopped working in films and television, working with all of Italy's leading directors of the 1950s through the 1970s. She earned an Academy Award for her performance in the screen adaption of her close friend Tennessee Williams' novel "The Rose Tattoo", and for the same film, the British Academy Film Award, the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, and a Golden Goble Award. She was famous for her earthy, passionate "woman-of-the-soil" roles. She and Rossellini were lovers for some years after "Open City" until he began his infamous affair with Ingrid Bergman. She had a son out-of-wedlock by Italian actor Massimo Serato. After her son was stricken with polio as a toddler, she dedicated her life to caring for him as he lost the use of his legs due to paralysis. Her one marriage, to Italian director Goffredo Alessandrini in 1935, lasted only a short while and ended in an annulment. Her last film was Fellini's "Roma" in 1972. She died from pancreatic cancer. After a funeral attended by an enormous crowd of devoted fans, she was laid to rest in the family mausoleum of Roberto Rossellini but then subsequently interred in the Cimitero Comunale di San Felice Circeo.