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Other authors named Roberto:
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Author's popularity: 0
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Popularity: 3
Vote: | Fellini belongs to nature. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | For me, Fellini was like a watermelon. It is there. A watermelon cannot die. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I remember in the circus learning that the clown was the prince, the high prince. I always thought that the high prince was the lion or the magician, but the clown is the most important. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | In Italy, the country where fascism was born, we have a particular relation with the Holocaust, but as a turning point in history it belongs to everybody in the world. It is a part of humanity. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It's a sign of mediocrity when you demonstrate gratitude with moderation. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | My duty is to try to reach beauty. Cinema is emotion. When you laugh you cry. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | My father was a farmer and my mother was a farmer, but, my childhood was very good. I am very grateful for my childhood, because it was full of gladness and good humanity. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | My mother brought me magicians and witches, because I was very ugly, really revolting. So she thought somebody had put a spell on me - this is the truth - so she made me drink some horrible terrifying potions, for year. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The first movie I saw - and I don't know if it influenced me - was Ben Hur. We watched it outside in a corn field, and it ran backwards, so the first movie I ever saw was Ben Hur backwards. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | When I first saw a Fellini movie, I came out of the movie theatre and decided to become a lawyer! I thought to myself, it's impossible to make something so beautiful! |
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Biography
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Roberto Benigni (born October 27, 1952) is an Italian film and television actor and director. He was born in Misericordia, Tuscany, Italy.
Benigni is probably best known for his tragicomedy Life Is Beautiful (La Vita è bella), filmed in Cortona and Arezzo, about a man who tries to protect his son during his internment at a Nazi concentration camp, by telling him that the Holocaust is an elaborate game and he must adhere very carefully to the rules to win. Benigni's father had spent two years in a concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen, and La Vita è bella is based in part on his father's experiences; the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor (Benigni directed himself).
Benigni also directed Il Mostro ("The Monster"), Il piccolo diavolo ("The little devil", with Walter Matthau) and Johnny Stecchino ("Johnny Toothpick"). With the very popular comic actor Massimo Troisi, he played in Non ci resta che piangere ("Nothing left to do but cry"), a fable in which the protagonists are suddenly thrown back in time to the 15th century, just a little before 1492. They start looking for Columbus in order to stop him discovering the Americas, but are not able to reach him.
Benigni's wife, Nicoletta Braschi, has starred with him in most of the films he directed.
Benigni has starred in two films by American Director Jim Jarmusch.
In Down By Law (1986) he plays Bob, the innocent abroad, convicted for murder, whose irrepressible good humour and optimism help him escape and find love (also starring Braschi as his beloved.)
In Night on Earth (1991) he plays a cabby in Rome, causing his passenger, a priest, great discomfort by confessing his revolting sexual experiences. He also starred in the first of Jarmusch's series of short films
Coffee and Cigarettes (1986).
Benigni is also a well appreciated improvisatory poet (poesia estemporanea is a form of art popularly followed and practiced in Tuscany), and is appreciated for his recitations of Dante's Divina Commedia by memory.
Very popular in Italy, Benigni became famous in the 1970s for a shocking TV series called Televacca, by Renzo Arbore, in which he interpreted a particular hymn on specific biological functions. A great scandal for the time, the series was suspended due to censorship.
Afterwards, he appeared during a public political demonstration of the Italian Communist Party (of which he was a sympathiser), and in this occasion he took in his arms and dandled the national leader Enrico Berlinguer, a very serious figure. It was an unprecedented fact, given that until that moment Italian politicians were proverbially serious and formal (and Berlinguer was perhaps the most serious of them all); it represented a breaking point, after which politicians experimented newer habits and "public manners", attended less formal happenings and, generally speaking, modified their lifestyle in order to exhibit a more popular behaviour.
Benigni was censored again in the 1980s for calling the Pope John Paul II something impolite during an important live TV show. His famously mangled English is a put-on, apparently.
Benigni is currently directing a new film called "La tigre e la neve", shooting in Rome, Tunisia, and Umbria.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Roberto Benigni".
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