Maria Pia Casilio’s brisk manners and nasal voice made her a distinctive supporting actor. We value her most in Umberto D., where the maid has time to become someone with a life of her own.
Fi1m perspective
In Umberto D. (1952), Maria’s daily routines are allowed to take up time. Maria Pia Casilio plays the maid, and Vittorio De Sica does not hurry her back to the business of helping the old man. Cesare Zavattini’s screenplay gives her a life beyond his difficulties; Casilio makes that attention worthwhile without having to dominate the film. We were moved by the time spent with Maria, because those ordinary routines let us care about someone who might otherwise have been there only to help the leading character.
Her busiest stretch, from 1952 to 1960, brought supporting work in neorealist dramas and Italian comedies, often as naive or querulous small-town girls. The brisk manners and nasal voice made her easy to place, though they also made her easy to cast in much the same part. Luigi Comencini’s Bread, Love and Dreams (1953) gave her Paoletta; in An American in Rome (1954), she played Elvira, the girlfriend of Alberto Sordi’s character. Those comic roles should not obscure the economy of her work as the maid Georgette in Marcel Carné’s Thérèse Raquin (1953).
The frustration is how rarely her work took her beyond supporting parts. A performer readily recognised by a voice or a manner can be hired to supply just that, and the repeated provincial girls suggest how narrow the expectations became. Umberto D. gives us a reason to want more: Maria is allowed to matter separately from the central character, rather than merely make his circumstances easier to understand. De Sica and Zavattini give Casilio time, and she does not fill it with demands to be noticed.
Later appearances became occasional, but we would start with the early work rather than try to turn a long list of small parts into a claim for neglected greatness. Umberto D. is the place to see what she can do when the writing takes a supporting character seriously. The film’s music occasionally presses for feelings that Carlo Battisti has already earned, and the patient attention to Maria needs no such encouragement either. Watch it for Casilio as well as Battisti, and give the maid’s routines the attention De Sica gives them.
Biography
Maria Pia Casilio (5 May 1935 – 10 April 2012) was an Italian film actress. Born in San Pio delle Camere near L'Aquila, she made her screen debut as Maria in Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. (1952). She appeared in numerous Italian films of the 1950s, including Bread, Love and Dreams (1953) as Paoletta, An American in Rome (1954) as Elvira, Frisky (1954) as Paoletta and Totò, Peppino e i fuorilegge (1956) as Rosina.
Casilio was typically cast as a querulous and naive small-town girl. After marrying voice actor Giuseppe Rinaldi she largely retired from acting in the mid-1960s, though she returned for occasional roles such as Ines in Us Real Men, We Hard Men (1987) and a part in Three Men and a Leg (1997). Their daughter Francesca Rinaldi also became an actress.
