The Diva Mother: Motherhood and Stardom in Italian Cinema

This book examines the figure of the "mother-diva" as a central yet understudied configuration in Italian cinema and media culture. Challenging the traditional opposition between stardom and maternity, it argues that motherhood is not a marginal interruption in the diva's trajectory, but a constitutive dimension of her screen persona, cultural authority, and public legacy. Through close textual analysis, archival research, and engagement with both Italian and Anglophone scholarship, the study traces how actresses such as Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani, Claudia Cardinale and other iconic figures negotiated the tensions between erotic capital, national identity, celebrity culture, and maternal symbolism across postwar Italian modernity. In doing so, the book reveals how the maternal body became a site of ideological projection: associated simultaneously with authenticity, sacrifice, moral authority, desire, excess, and unruliness. Placing film texts in dialogue with publicity materials, magazines, and popular discourse, Maria Elena D'Amelio reconstructs the industrial and cultural mechanisms that shaped these star images while situating them within broader debates surrounding gender, celebrity, media culture, and national identity. The concept of the "mother-diva" emerges not only as a distinctive contribution to Italian cinema studies, but also as a powerful framework for understanding the intersections of femininity, stardom, and cultural modernity more broadly. Combining rigorous scholarship with an engaging and accessible style, the book offers an original contribution to film studies, star studies, feminist media scholarship, and celebrity culture, while opening new perspectives on the relationship between motherhood, performance, and public identity in twentieth-century media culture.