Monica Guerritore

Monica Guerritore — Biography

Monica Guerritore was born in Rome on 5 January 1958, the daughter of a father from Naples and a mother from Calabria. She took a small part in Vittorio De Sica's Una breve vacanza at thirteen, and made her formal stage debut at sixteen under Giorgio Strehler's direction in The Cherry Orchard. Around that time she formed both an artistic and a personal partnership with the director Gabriele Lavia, taking on demanding roles he staged such as Jocasta, Lady Macbeth, Ophelia and Miss Julie; the couple separated in 2001 while rehearsing Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage.

She entered film in 1976 opposite Marcello Mastroianni in the picture Signore e signori, buonanotte, and the following year rose to the lead in RAI's colour television production of Manon Lescaut; other career highlights include Salvatore Samperi's Fotografando Patrizia (1985) and Mauro Bolognini's La Venexiana (1986). Lavia directed her in Scandalous Gilda (1985), Evil Senses (1986) and an adaptation of Giovanni Verga's La Lupa (1996), and she herself wrote and staged the plays Giovanna d'Arco (2004-2006) and Dall'Inferno all'Infinito (2008).

She appeared in Ferzan Özpetek's A Perfect Day, in My Big Gay Italian Wedding (2018), and in the Netflix series Deceitful Love (2024). In 2025 she made her directing debut with Anna, a film about Anna Magnani in which she also played the title role.