“I would have been calm if I had taken the path chosen for me by my father”: like this Anna Galiena al Corriere della Seraabout her desire to be an actress. “At the age of 4 I went on stage for the first time, a brown wig covered my blonde curls. – he says – I played the Madonna in the Spanish nuns’ nursery. At 8 years old, Rai came to my school for the casting of a drama, I found myself in a male role, Prince Olaf of Denmarkit was a fairy tale. Then I studied dance at the Rome Opera school. Dad didn’t realize that, for me, it was the beginning of a great thing.”
It wasn’t easy for Galiena, who argued with her father and showed “discomfort by doing badly at school (…). I began to stutter in front of othersmy brother called me Zagaglia which in Roman dialect means to stumble, to speak in an uncertain, confused way”. The decision to leave home at 21, the arrival of ’68: “I lived with five boys. It was a real commune. But I didn’t dress like a hippie with flowers in my hair. I was the only one who washed everyone’s sheets and I insisted: from now on we take turns. We were idealistic and politicized. To make a living we developed other people’s scripts.”
Galiena travels and never abandons the path to becoming an actress, indeed he arrives at the Actors Studio: “Many say they attended him. I am the only Italian life member, together with Francesca De Sapio. I remember Robert De Niro who was a pleasure, Al Pacinosilent and reserved, Dustin Hoffman had filmed Germi’s Alfredo Alfredo and wanted to talk only about Italy. Then other giants, Arthur Penn, Rod Steiger, Elia Kazan, very strict, if we were not on time in the session he would lock the theater, it was fixed that we had to feel the space in the bodyso he told us to walk backwards, when we reached the chair we had to sit down. Everyone with their butts on the ground.”
The films, and then the choice of “appear less: I had to find myself, I didn’t recognize myself in the image of a sexy, aggressive, confident woman. I disappeared from the posters, from the spotlights, but it is equally true that in that period, in 2006, at the Piccolo and at the Franco Parenti in Milan, I did my best theater show, Which drug is for me, directed by Andrée Ruth Shammah”. And when asked why at a certain point she took 5 years off she replies: “It was suggested to me to say so. Everyone said that after 40 it was difficult for an actress to find work. And I achieved success at the age of 40. I’ll be 76 at the end of December. And I’ve never worked so hard, Emily in Paris, More and more sexy which is Andreozzi’s film, the readings of Homer in Sicily, the theater for Gabriele Muccino and in Paris in a modern version of Le Troiane”.
