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Roberto Benigni
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Spouse
Nicoletta Braschi (1991 - present)
Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
Talented comic actor whose enormous popularity in his native Italy is spreading quickly across international waters. He learned the Italian tradition of improvised song and poetry while still in his teens and became part of Rome's underground theater in the late 1960s. One of the monologues he performed, "Cioni Mario," was adapted into the little-seen film Berlinguer ti volgio (I Love You, Berlinguer Soon after, Benigni starred in his own TV series and appeared in Marco Ferreri's Chiedo Asilo (1979) and Bertolucci's Luna (1979). He starred in and directed Tu mi turbi (1983) and achieved great success with his second directing effort, Non ci resta che piangere (1985), as well as Tuttobenigni (1985), adapted from his smash one-man stage show. He also wrote, starred in, and directed Little Devils (1988) with Walter Matthau, and Johnny Stecchino (1992), a comedy about a bus driver who is mistaken for a Mafioso, which became the highest-grossing film in Italian history. Benigni was featured in Fellini's The Voice of the Moon (1990), but is probably best known to American audiences for his work in the Jim Jarmusch films Down by Law (1986) and Night on Earth (1992, as the Roman taxi driver who confesses his sex life to a priest). Blake Edwards then selected him to star in Son of the Pink Panther (1993), a failed attempt to revive the slapstick series. |  |
