In “Illuminate” Emanuela Fanelli talks about Franca Valeri’s multifaceted talent: from actress to screenwriter, from director to author, Franca revolutionized the world of entertainment, breaking the taboo on female comedy: the appointment is for Monday 23 January at 11.15 pm on Rai 3.
Franca Valeri, pseudonym of Franca Norsa, knew from an early age that acting would be her path: already as a child, in fact, by imitating her mother’s friends and reciting some caricatures, she gave birth to “La Signorina Snob”, which later became one of her symbolic characters, with which she stigmatized with sagacity and irony the behavior of the Milanese bourgeoisie, to which she herself belonged. Due to her father’s Jewish origins, her racial laws forced her to leave school at 18, but she still managed to enroll as a private student. Determined to achieve her goal, after failing at the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome, aware of her talent, she continued to act and do cabaret until 1949, the year in which she made her debut in Paris with the “Company of the Gobbis”. In the meantime, Franca had already invented her famous “masks”: in addition to “La Signorina Snob”, also “La Sora Cecioni” and “Cesira the manicure”, characters with which, with impudence and elegance, she revolutionized the comedy of mid twentieth century, until then declined strictly for men.
The docu-film dedicated to her kicks off when the actress-narrator Emanuela Fanelli prepares to stage one of Franca Valeri’s iconic monologues, “A happy wife”. To do this, Emanuela studies her works and retraces her life, her loves and her career, bringing out the cultured and complex personality of this artist who used irony to make a refined and pungent social criticism of the customs of the Italian society of that period. A multifaceted talent that has seen her in the role of interpreter, author and director not only of comedies, but also of films she wrote and interpreted, TV programs and operas.
On this journey, Emanuela Fanelli moves between the places dear to Franca Valeri to retrace the fundamental stages of her life: from the theater dressing room to her villa on Lake Bracciano, where she spent her last years and where today the “Associazione Franca Valeri – Onlus pro-assistance of abandoned animals”, which she founded to fight stray dogs.
In parallel with the fictional sequences, the story is enriched with archival materials and the contributions of numerous illustrious witnesses, including the daughter Stefania Bonfadelli, the actresses Cinzia Leone and Gabriella Franchini, the director of the Teatro Parenti in Milan Andree Ruth Shammah, the director and television presenter Pino Strabioli, the director and artistic director Giorgio Ferrara and his friend Michele Della Valle, to return an intimate and unpublished portrait of the unstoppable artist who made the history of Italian comedy.
