She was post-war Italy's (and Europe's) first international pin-up: one British headline described her as ‘the Rage of the Continent’ (Schiff 1950), while in the US she became known as ‘the Atomic Italian’. Director Giuseppe De Santis characterised her breakout role as ‘the Rita Hayworth of the Italian periphery’ (Gundle 1996: 314), but she has also been described as ‘la Greta Garbo del cinema italiano’ (Cimmino and Masi 1994: 134), a reference to the enigmatic and distant persona she subsequently adopted. Her career ranged from neorealism to melodrama to commedia all'Italiana (forming a particularly popular partnership with Alberto Sordi) to art house (Pasolini and Visconti gave her a new international profile in the late 1960s/early ’70s). She was married to arguably the most famous (and controversial) Italian film producer, Dino De Laurentiis, something that is sometimes used to dismiss her as a mediocre actress promoted beyond her abilities by a powerful husband (see Shipman 1989 and Thomson 2003, for example). Iconic and era-defining in her initial roles, Silvana Mangano is nevertheless overshadowed in accounts of Italian stardom by her contemporaries Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. As the first of the so-called maggiorate fisiche (voluptuous beauty contest winners turned film stars), she paved the way for their success, which unquestionably overtook her own, a scenario that appears to have held little concern for her. No account of Italian film history can overlook the cultural impact of her role in the film Riso amaro/Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, Italy 1948), which globalised a new and powerful image of Italian female sexuality – the mondina in tight shorts and torn stockings, underarm hair unshaved, chewing gum, dancing to boogie-woogie on the record player she carries with her, at one point appearing from behind the magazine Grand Hotel that embodies her Americanised aspirations. Mangano has been seen to have incarnated ‘a new prototype of Italian womanhood’ (Gundle 2007: 108), ‘a creature of the earth, rich with joyous sensuality, generous in its proportions, warm and familiar: a body-landscape’ (Grignaffini 1988: 123). But her subsequent career is harder to map, marked by periods of inactivity, a radical reshaping of her body (from voluptuous maggiorata to slender, elegant diva), a well-publicised antipathy towards filmmaking, and the later move into art house (the point at which she usually resurfaces in Italian film histories, but rarely as the centre of attention).