Profile of Roberto Benigni on Famous Like Me

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 in 1998 nominated for seven Academy Awards and won for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Actor (Benigni directed himself) and Best Original Soundtrack, written and directed by Nicola Piovani. Famously, he climbed on the back of his seat and applauded the audience after he was told he had won one of his Oscars.

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 cabbie 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.

Benigni is currently directing a new film about the Iraq War called La tigre e la neve (The Tiger and the Snow), shooting in Rome, Tunisia, and Umbria. On October 15, 2005, he performed an impromptu strip tease on Italy's most watched evening news program, removing his shirt and draping it over the newscaster's shoulders. Prior to removing his shirt, Benigni had already hijacked the opening credits of the news program, jumping behind the newscaster and announcing: "Berlusconi has resigned." (Benigni is an outspoken critic of media tycoon Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The previous day, he led a crowd of thousands in Rome on Friday in protest at the center-right government's decision to cut state arts funding by 35 percent.)

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