page_title: Maria Melato
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Maria Melato / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Maria Melato
context_page_description: Maria Melato was an Italian actress of the stage, screen, and radio.
context_section_description: Melato began acting as a young woman. She joined the troupe of Irma Gramatica in about 1905, and found her first acclaim in 1908, substituting for Gramatica in Milan. From 1909 to 1921 she worked with director Virgilio Talli in the Compagnia Drammatica Italiana. "She seems to play as if acting was not the exciting, soul-wracking thing that some of its critics would have it, but a sober duty and a simple pleasure," noted one critic of the day.
  She started her own company in 1921. She toured with her company in South America in the 1920s. In the 1930s she worked with the National Institute of Ancient Drama on staging Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides and Women of Trachis by Sophocles, at Syracuse. In 1935 she toured through Sicily, Tripoli, and Benghazi, then returned to Latin America in 1939. During World War II she lost a hundred trunks of costumes, props, and personal possessions when a warehouse was destroyed by bombs. She worked in radio after the war.
  Melato appeared in ten films: Il ritorno (1914), Anna Karenina (1917), Le due Marie (1918), Il volo degli aironi (1920), Il trittico dell'amore (1920), Le due esistenze (1920), La principessa del sogno (1942), Redenzione (1943), In High Places (1945), and Il fabbro del convento (1945).
caption: Portrait of Maria Melato, by Giuseppe Amisani
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