Miriam Leone: “My forgotten Oriana Fallaci, stealing souls by playing characters like her”

Not the war correspondent, the relentless interviewer of world leaders, the voice of invectives from The Rage and the Pride post 9/11, but the lesser-known Oriana Fallaci, the one from the beginnings in journalism, from 1955 to 1959, between reports from Hollywood and the first major personal traumas. It is the portrait in eight episodes (produced by Paramount Television International Studios and Minerva Pictures in association with Redstring) of the journalist and writer, who passed away in 2006, encapsulated in Miss Fallaci, the series by Luca Ribuoli, Giacomo Martelli, Alessandra Gonnella starring Miriam Leone (in the photo), making her debut with the first two episodes at the Rome Film Festival and soon on Rai 1 (there will be no initial airing on Paramount+).

“We explore her ‘age of innocence,'” explains the Catania-born actress, who had already portrayed Fallaci in Alessandra Gonella’s 2019 short film A cup of coffee with Marilyn, on an episode also told in the fiction. The series (for which the producers do not exclude other seasons to continue the story) “is titled Miss Fallaci because then she will become Oriana – says the actress -. It is the coming-of-age story of a girl who discovers herself and tries to assert herself in her passion. We have done an obsessive research of her origins, also in the look of those years, and it was not easy also because her first television interviews are from the Sixties. We hope to have told the strength of Oriana in her dreams and actions, between defeats, victories, anxieties, and depressions, showing also the fears of a girl who becomes a woman.” She “wanted to be a writer and said so in the masculine, the journalist jacket was too tight for her.”

The series (built with a particularly pop approach), according to Leone, can bring Fallaci “closer to the new generations who know little about her. ‘The Rage and the Pride’ created a sort of damnatio memoriae on her, a great intellectual of the twentieth century with much to say even today.”

The story, which among the cast also includes Maurizio Lastrico, Francesca Agostini, Johannes Johannesson, Ken Duken, Rosanna Gentili, Giordano De Plano, Francesco Colella, opens in the mid-Fifties, with the journalist in the editorial office of L’Europeo, where she does not accept being “relegated” to covering cinema. So she embarks on a bet with the director to interview Marilyn Monroe, asking in return, if she succeeded, to move on to other topics. Thus begins her adventure in the United States where she will come from New York to Hollywood, to also reveal blackmails and secrets suffered by stars.

At the same time, the journalist begins an intense and tormented relationship with colleague Alfredo Pieroni (Lastrico). “No one could expect that a strong person like her, who used the pen as a scalpel, would be so fragile in love – adds Miriam Leone -. It’s a paradox of many great women, who often find themselves with men not up to their level.” She “was very hard on herself. She did not allow anyone to be less than a hero and had around her a hostile male world. She is at the same time “a romantic heroine, who does not accept compromises and does not give up her femininity” and “a solitary feminist who goes her own way but at the same time opens a path for other women.” In the series “we also investigate the first private pains, the most difficult ones, like facing a first miscarriage, which brings in her an emotional and physical breakdown. All experiences that made her more combative. The greatest injustice for her, was war, also experienced as a partisan fighter. She later said that she considered conflicts a postponed abortion of 20 years, because in wars we send our children to die.”

As an actress “I still don’t know why I accepted to play her – she says smiling – but these are projects that steal your soul. She is one of those characters you want to face head-on, a free spirit. At first I was afraid to play the role but then I felt very supported by this fantastic team.”