Roberto Benigni - biography

“My duty is to try to reach beauty.  Cinema is emotion.  When you laugh you cry.”

“For me, Fellini was like a watermelon.  It is there.  A watermelon cannot die.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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!”

“It’s a sign of mediocrity when you demonstrate gratitude with moderation.”

“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.”

“Fellini belongs to nature.”

“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.”

Roberto Benigni directed the following films:
L’Addio a Enrico Berlinguer (1984)
Il Mostro (1994)
La Vita è bella (1997)
Pinocchio (2002)
La Tigre e la neve (2005)


Roberto Benigni has appeared in the following films:
Chiedo asilo (1979)
Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
To Rome with Love (2012)


Roberto Benigni contributed to the screenplay for the following films:
Chiedo asilo (1979)