Sandra Milo, the true face of Amarcord
The actress, mistress and muse of Federico Fellini, was the inspiration behind one of the film’s most iconic characters. Yet she turned the part down at the last minute. We trace this story through archive ephemera and memories.

There is a moment, presumably in the spring of 1973, when Sandra Milo’s house intercom rings. It is the florist with a delivery of 100 red roses. On the card, a dedication signed “Federico”.
The homage is Fellini’s final and extreme attempt to persuade his ‘Sandrocchia’ to go back on her steps and accept the role of Gradisca in his next film, Amarcord.
The roses look like the gift of a wounded, almost betrayed lover. At the roots of the actress’ rejection, lies indeed a sentimental issue. Her husband Mario Ergas has set her an ultimatum: ‘Either Amarcord or the children’.
More than attachment to the family, it is jealousy that drives and devours him. It is the awareness of the professional (but above all intimate) affinity between the director and his wife. A secret relationship, which though everyone knew about, and of which Sandra would give a detailed account in her book Caro Federico, published almost a decade later in 1982.
Yet Milo had been very close to a part in the Oscar-winning film. The role of Gradisca, the village femme fatale and hopeless romantic, seemed to have been tailor-made for her by Fellini, who had sketched her character traits and iconography on paper, in his proverbial drawings.
There is footage and photographs of the film’s auditions, with Milo in the 1930s costume designed by Danilo Donati. Sandra gazes into the camera with her trademark gaze: the eyebrows are long and flicking backwards, the eyes at the same time naughty and pure. Her candid face is framed by the black feathers of the red, which sinuously wraps and defines her silhouette. The very same coat that would end up forever identifying in the history of cinema another actress with a striking physiognomic resemblance: Magali Noël.
In a documentary broadcast by RAI in 1974, Sandra Milo is interviewed about her vanished role. The crew intercepts the actress while she is walking her two children to school, a scene as candid as her sugar-paper coloured coat. Perhaps a veiled subtext to the marital casus belli that led to her mutiny from the film set. Who knows.
Milo suddenly appears aged, tired, for once a mother and no longer the femme fatale of the Dolce Vita heydays. Her hair is short and curled, the orange knitwear is not dissimilar to those worn by many other housewives, who in the mid-1970s felt the anguish deriving from the oil crisis, waiting for their husbands to return from their factory shifts.
The degrees of separation between the vamp she once was and Mariangela Melato’s role in La classe operaia va in paradiso, now seem to have shrunk, almost vanished. Yet her eyes are still lit, her tongue is playful in its enfant terrible flicks, her words sweet and ringing. In her thoughts about Magali Noël’s performance – praised by the interviewer for her ability to become a ‘village airhead’ – one senses a certain regret, which, however, never bursts into rancour nor evil. Everything with Sandrocchia remains naïve, playful, evanescent like Federico and the characters portrayed in Amarcord.




‘I had pictured her as a greedy woman, greedy for all the good things in life, like a big ice cream, like a glass of good wine, or like playing blind man’s buff. “Catch me, catch me”…it’s all a game. [She is about] The pleasure of wearing a nice dress, of feeling the anticipation on your body, of feeling that they are looking at you, that they want you…and the desire in you to be liked.’
The real Gradisca is Sandra. Or, rather, Sandra is the real Gradisca. A role that would have helped her exorcise certain demons of mature life, to like herself again. To be reunited again with her Federico.
What remains is the candid and at the same time poignant footage in the RAI archives, but above all a series of photographs from the set, so verisimilar that one wonders if they are not the result of AI. But with Federico Fellini, after all, there is no dream or illusion that is not possible.
Opening image: Sandra Milo auditions as Gradisca, 1973. Photos via Maison Bibelot.