It is said that Eleonora Giulia Amalia Duse , the leading lady of the Italian stage in the late 19th/early 20th century, was an intensely private, introverted woman who once told a journalist that, outside the theater “I do not exist.” One wonders, therefore, what she would have made of “Duse,” Pietro Marcello ‘s worshipful portrait of the artist as a no-longer-young woman, in which Duse (as she was known) played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi , is a woman who very much existed — volubly, exquisitely and in extraordinary, throaty paroxysms of despair and delight — every tremulous, momentous instant of her offstage life.

Renowned in her time for her intense naturalism and her immersion in the great roles of the day (especially in the plays of Ibsen and her onetime lover Gabriel D’Annunzio

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