Giulia Lazzarini: “Theater taught me to fly”

How did you get there?
From afar. No precedent in the family, even if my father played by ear, he spent hours at the piano singing and I learned a lot from him. Being an only child (a little “Melodramatic”, mum claimed), sometimes I split myself. Here, represent someone outside of me: I think that was the first click. Then, improvising little shows with displaced children like me in Riccione, I seemed to be carried. Shy? No: I would define my reluctance as an “inferiority complex”. It was a quiet childhood, after all: the tragedy came when, after the armistice, we returned to Milan and the bombings began.

A trauma that he told in a show, Gorla Gorla stop.
It reconstructs the tragedy of an elementary school where, in 1944, 184 children were killed by a British air force bomb. It should be proposed again, it is terrifying to see how topical it is again.

From childhood performances to professional achievement.
Among my friends there was a lady who worked in a weekly and suggested responding to the call for the Experimental Center of Cinematography in Rome. Mom, who was an enterprising type, had Elio Luxardo photograph me and sent her portraits, but – when they saw me in person – they said no, too young. The following year, at 17, I was admitted.

Giulia Lazzarini with Nanni Moretti and Margherita Buy in “My mother”.

The pluses triumphed

He was also in class with Domenico Modugno.
And with Carlo Giuffré, however, I did not frequent them very much. When we returned from Cinecittà in the center by blue tram, they went around, I had to go home: I had been entrusted to acquaintances. Those were different times, one today at 17 goes to Australia. A beautiful time but, in the end, I felt that cinema was not for me.

Why not?
They wanted other types of girls: the “oversized” or the non-professional – it was the time of neo-realism – and I (less than 1.60 tall, petite) did not fit into either category. I returned to Milan where television was taking its first steps (the dramas and comedies were shot here). There was no great competition: cinema or theater actors did not give in to TV out of snobbery. At least until they understood how much fame even a carousel gave.

What did acting mean to you?
On stage I felt free while in life I have always been shy. Only with maturity does one acquire a certain self-awareness and free oneself from stupid fears: how much time lost in “gnè gnè”.

Mother courage

If youth knew, if old age could …
That’s it! Only as I got older did I say: but-who cares-does it matter? They are what they are. And luckily I met Strehler who was able to understand what was moving inside me and allowed me to become aware of what I could do. Everything I know – and I still put the ABC to good use – I learned from him. I will never stop thanking him.

Strehler used to say that everything comes easy for her.
No, she said: what others think is easy is very difficult for her! He was the only one who understood it. She took me by the hand with my difficulties and was able to take me everywhere. I have only one regret: we should have done Mother Courage of Sarajevo but the project ran aground. Who else would have had the courage to entrust that character to me? Nobody! Like when you take off your walker as a child, Giorgio made you walk alone, and then you grew up.

Giulia Lazzarini in “The Tempest” (photo © Ciminaghi-PiccoloTeatroMilano).

An excruciating challenge

He even made her fly.
The storm it was one of the most atrocious challenges: “I see Ariel as a ball in the air, from which two little hands and two feet come out” explained Giorgio. Then there were no today’s technologies, I was tied to a steel cable (I owe my back problems to those representations), masked by its inimitable stage lights, while a huge fan blew on me.

No doubt about accepting?
Imagine, he would have captured me even if he had anticipated me: I’ll throw you into the fire! But Happy days it was just as complicated, as to lose your head: acting with the motionless body, buried in the sand. In every show he inserted some obstacle to go beyond, beyond, beyond. Even in Elvira or the theatrical passion by Louis Jouvet, after all, the bar was high: he played the teacher, I was the pupil… somewhat agée: I was 52 years old!

Do you remember the first meeting?
I went to an audition for the role of Anja in the first Cherry gardenit was 1953, but I also had an audition for The tattooed rose that Luchino Visconti was preparing at Tennessee Williams.

AND?
I had to give up on the Piccolo, remaining tied to Visconti. Which did not carry out the project. But by now I was hired and so I found myself wandering around The twelfth night without doing anything: I learned by observing. After a year I broke up and was part of brilliant companies (a genre that no longer exists, people who came from the magazine): they taught me the ease that I didn’t have.

And here, in 1955, theHarlequin with Strehler. The next turns?
When I stopped because I was expecting my daughter, Costanza, in 1972. And when, a few years later, my husband passed away (Vincenzo De Toma, ed): he was an actor, I had no acquaintances that were not in the theatrical family. The second marriage with Carlo Battistoni, director and collaborator of Strehler. Ronconi? I worked with him in The fan, but I was more in keeping with Giorgio’s methodology, who wanted to know you deeply; Luca didn’t care.

Giulia Lazzarini with Giorgio Strehler (© Ciminaghi-PiccoloTeatroMilano).

Getting married for fun

It is true that Natalia Ginzburg wrote for her The interview?
Yup! I had done his on TV I married you for joy, she liked it and phoned me. My husband Carlo had the idea of ​​asking her for a text. The result was a true, sensitive, intelligent character, out of this world: a beautiful soul.

At the cinema he continued to indulge little.
But when Moretti called me to audition for My mother, I immediately got off in Rome! It took two or three before he decided. A teacher, a convoluted thread: he made thirty takes for a scene. I remember that of her in the hospital with Margherita Buy by the side of the bed (a cold, a cold!), I had to stay bent towards her. After the twentieth, Nanni says: “Well, it went well!”. “Oh, thank goodness!”. “Now let’s do another one …”. At one point I shouted: help! I can’t move my neck anymore! Result? A week at home, between massages and injections.

Ever thought of writing an autobiography? You embody the history of the Italian theater.
No, no, no! (laughs). I don’t feel that interesting: I just put a talent to work (I’m proud of this) without losing myself in vanity. Instead of “career”, let’s call mine militancy, a term that implies discipline …

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