Karen Stone, a widowed American actress in Rome, falls for a young Italian gigolo — and discovers that love, at her age, is both a gift and a danger.
In The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), based on Tennessee Williams’s novella, Vivien Leigh plays Karen Stone, a former stage star who, after her husband’s death, settles in Rome. There she meets Paolo di Leo, played by Warren Beatty, a handsome young man who lives off wealthy women, and she falls for him, even though she knows he is using her.
Leigh plays Karen with a fragile dignity. She shows a woman who is still beautiful, still intelligent, and still hungry for love, and who knows, even as she gives herself to Paolo, that he will leave her.
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is a sad, elegant drama about ageing and desire, and Leigh’s Karen is one of her most poignant later performances: a star playing a star who has lost her audience, and who still wants to be loved.