The Quiet Twin or The Reluctant Movie Star

In WERoberts’biography, the quiet teenage sister of screen star Pier Angeli reluctantly agrees to a screen test, which leads to a robust career in 1950s and ’60s Hollywood.

In 1932, Italian structural engineer Luigi Pierangeli and his young wife, Enrica, welcomed fraternal twin daughters. As the girls grew up in Rome, Anna was more outgoing, and Marisa was quiet. When the girls were 16, a man on the street handed Anna a business card: “We’re looking for a girl exactly like you for our next film!” he said. “Why don’t you ask your parents to contact me?” Anna, under the stage name Pier Angeli, was a natural in the coming-of-age film Tomorrow Is Too Late(1950); she was soon cast by MGM in Teresa(1951), a role that would earn her a Golden Globe Award as “Most Promising Newcomer.” Anna’s stage name was Pier Angeli (after her surname); after her father died in 1950, the family moved to California, where Marisa was offered a screen test for a part in What Price Glory(1952). She hesitantly agreed. Her stage surname, Pavan, came from the name of a Jewish Italian general whom her family sheltered during World War II. Her fame rose after The Rose Tattoo(1955) with Burt Lancaster, for which she was nominated for an Oscar and won her own Golden Globe. Over the course of this short biography, the author delivers a detailed view of an accomplished performer’s life and a very specific era of Technicolor dramas and light comedies that don’t get as much attention as works from previous or later decades. However, readers who aren’t already familiar with Pavan and her work may not grasp the level of her fame or the acclaim that her talents received. More exposition earlier in the book about her place in the film industry would have provided useful context. Still, the author succeeds in presenting an immersive portrait of the industry in which the Pierangeli sisters worked.

A robustly researched memoir of a lesser-known movie star in a riveting setting.