Prince Spaghetti commercial - a classic..The Muse touched this commercial.
The key to this famous commercial is how these amateur actors portray the indelible affection between a mother and son...priceless! Edward Strafaci
From Juliet to Alice Kramden, women have communed from their upper-story windows, but few ever reached a wider audience with as mundane a message as Mary Fiumara.
In an indelible long-running television commercial first broadcast in 1969, Mrs. Fiumara, playing a devoted, robust and aproned mother, convincingly hollers “Anthony! Anthony!” from a second-floor tenement window in the Italian North End of Boston to summon home her 12-year-old son from blocks away for a hearty serving of Prince spaghetti.
To get there, Anthony, in short pants and sneakers, wends his way through a crowded street market, races up the stairs and arrives out of breath but, like his welcoming mother, smiling.
Mrs. Fiumara (pronounced few-MAH-ruh) died on Tuesday. She was 88 and had lived in the North End since she was a teenager. Her death was confirmed by her son, John Fiumara.
Her long connection to the neighborhood was a big reason she was cast for the commercial. Its producers had been seeking authenticity, choosing to film in the North End itself and casting local people whom they discovered on location.
Mrs. Fiumara was chosen when a casting director saw her peering from a window. (The apartment in the ad was not hers, however.)
Her two-word speaking part was the beginning and end of Mrs. Fiumara’s acting career. She went back to being a homemaker and remained one.
The boy in the commercial, Anthony Martignetti, and his family had moved to the neighborhood from Italy only a few years before he was cast. Shown for 13 years, the commercial transformed him into a local celebrity. He is now 58.
“If it wasn’t for her, the commercial would never exist,” Mr. Martignetti, a court officer and the divorced father of a 12-year-old son of his own, said of Mrs. Fiumara in a phone interview on Thursday.
“She was like my second mother,” he said. “She was always looking out for me, and anytime I would see her on the streets, she said, ‘How you doing, Anthony, can I buy you an ice cream?’ — even before the commercial.”
Her long connection to the neighborhood was a big reason she was cast for the commercial. Its producers had been seeking authenticity, choosing to film in the North End itself and casting local people whom they discovered on location.
Mrs. Fiumara was chosen when a casting director saw her peering from a window. (The apartment in the ad was not hers, however.)
Her two-word speaking part was the beginning and end of Mrs. Fiumara’s acting career. She went back to being a homemaker and remained one.
The boy in the commercial, Anthony Martignetti, and his family had moved to the neighborhood from Italy only a few years before he was cast. Shown for 13 years, the commercial transformed him into a local celebrity. He is now 58.
“If it wasn’t for her, the commercial would never exist,” Mr. Martignetti, a court officer and the divorced father of a 12-year-old son of his own, said of Mrs. Fiumara in a phone interview on Thursday.
“She was like my second mother,” he said. “She was always looking out for me, and anytime I would see her on the streets, she said, ‘How you doing, Anthony, can I buy you an ice cream?’ — even before the commercial.”
Mr. Martignetti said he ultimately made about $20,000 from the Prince commercial. He appeared in one other, for a local restaurant. His son auditioned for a remake of the Prince commercial on the company’s centennial, but someone else got the part.
Prince Spaghetti, now a division of the New World Pasta Company in Harrisburg, Pa., was founded on Prince Street in Boston by three Sicilian immigrants in 1912.
In the early 1950s, to broaden its appeal beyond Italian-American consumers (and to entice those who still made their own macaroni), the company proclaimed, “Wednesday is Prince spaghetti day.”
The Jerome O’Leary advertising agency in Boston had coined a generic version of the slogan for a macaroni industry association, but when the group rejected it, it was snapped up by Prince’s chief executive, Joseph Pellegrino, another agency client. Mr. Pellegrino, a former shoeshine boy from Brooklyn, simply added the company’s name.
Mrs. Fiumara, born Oct. 6, 1927, in Italy, the daughter of Angelo Fronduto and the former Teresa Coppola, is survived by her sons, John and Richard; three grandchildren; and a brother, Pasquale Fronduto.
Comments
Post a Comment