Eleonora Duse: An Actress-Manager for the Italian Film Industry in the 1910s

Abstract

From a historiographical point of view, the Italian diva Eleonora Duse (1858–1924) as an actress-manager offers an original case study in relation to her only film performance in Cenere ( Ashes, 1916). This is a film adapted from the eponymous novel by Grazia Deledda (Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926). In the 1910s, when Duse decided to work in the Italian film industry, she was a celebrity and her name was a guarantee of success for the Ambrosio Company in Turin. The film producers wanted to use her celebrity in order to ensure success at the box office. As an actress-manager with a long and acclaimed international career in the theatre, Duse knew this mechanism very well, but her position was contrary to their expectations. In fact, she aimed to present herself as an anti-diva, with her wrinkle-furrowed face and white hair, proposing a fascinating artistic creation based on the ‘mother roles’ that she had created for the theatre. This paper explores new elements concerning the position of Duse as an actress-manager for the Italian film industry in the 1910s. It is focused on her strategy of reiterating her stage success in playing a mother. On film, she did not want to be an instrument used for commercial purposes, and she did not want to create a common popular diva film. With Cenere, Duse's capability as an actress-manager can be seen in her creation of this non-conventional, poetic role for the silent film industry in wartime Italy.