Profile of Franca Rame on Famous Like Me

Franca Rame (born 18 July 1929) married with Dario_Fo.

Franca Rame was born in a small town in the Province of Milan. That she happened to be born there was pure chance: her family was performing in the town at the time. Her father Domenico Rame, her mother Emilia and her brother, along with aunts, uncles, cousins and other actors and actresses hired on contract, were all part of a travelling theatre troupe touring the towns and villages of Lombardy and Piedmont.

The Rame family's ties to the theatre are very old. Since the late 17th century, they have been actors, and puppet masters, as the occasion required.

With the arrival of the cinema they shifted from puppet theatre to real theatre, enriched with all the "special effects" of the puppet theatre. They travelled from town to town, and were well received wherever they went.

Even today, her personal success in theatre and television notwithstanding, people in these towns still often refer to Franca as "the daughter of Domenico Rame". In the best tradition of the Commedia dell'Arte, the family improvised its performances, drawing on a rich repertoire of tragic and comical situations and dialogues.

They often opened in a new town - following a poll among the townspeople - with an enactment of the life of the local patron saint.

The family's repertoire ranged from the biblical texts over Shakespeare to Chekhov and Pirandello; from Niccodemi to the great l9th century historical novels - especially those with a socialist or anticlerical bent. Often their performances included enactments of the lives of men such as Giordano_Bruno, Arnaldo_da_Brescia and Galileo_Galilei.

Domenico Rame was the troupe's poet; a devout socialist, he often saw to it that the revenue from a performance was given in support of striking workers or used to build child-care facilities, or in other ways spent to improve the lives of the common people. The minutely documented records of this activity, which remains in the Rame-Fo archives, was probably maintained by Franca's mother Emilia Baldini, a school teacher and daughter of a municipal engineer in Bobbio.

As a young school teacher, Emilia fell in love with Domenico - twenty years her senior - who was passing through Bobbio with his marionettes and puppets. She married him, against the strong wishes of her family, and together they continued to tour all of Lombardy. Emilia soon learned the trades of acting and costume designer. It was she who taught their four children to act and to move on the stage. She was an outstanding woman, meticulous in all her work and an excellent organizer. In the end it was she who carried the troupe on her shoulders.

It was in this environment that Franca earned her apprenticeship. She has always felt at home on the stage because - as she says - "I was born there: I was only eight days old when I made my debut in my mother's arms [she played the new-born son of Geneviève of Brabant] ... I didn't say much that evening! "

Some years later, in the 1950-51 theatre season, Franca - following the lead of her sister Pia - left the family and joined the company of Tino_Scotti for a part in Marcello_Marchesi's "Ghe pensi mi" at the Teatro Olimpia in Milan.

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