Widely hailed as one of the world's funniest men, this loquacious, rubber-faced comic has been one of Italy's most popular actors for much of the last decade. At age 19, Benigni moved from working as a small-town street performer in his native Tuscany to performing stand-up comedy and acting in "experimental" theater in cosmopolitan Rome. Collaborating with Giuseppe Bertolucci, Benigni co-wrote the comic monologue "Cioni Mario Di Gaspare Fu Giulia/Mario Was Julia". This provided the foundation for his feature debut, "Berlinguer, Ti Voglio Bene/Berlinguer, I Love You" (1976), helmed by Bertolucci and a TV special "Onda Libera/Free Wave" about a critic who either misunderstands or misses seeing the films he's assigned to review. Benigni started his own successful career as an actor-writer-director with a collection of four comic sketches entitled "Tu Mi Turbi/You Disturb Me" (1983). This film also marked the first of his many screen collaborations with actress Nicoletta Braschi. (The pair married in December 1991.)
Benigni continued to work with notable European filmmakers including Constantin Costa-Gavras ("Clair de Femme", 1979), Bertolucci ("Luna" 1979) and Federico Fellini ("Voice of the Moon", 1990) before finding his greatest success writing, directing and starring in his own productions. In the US,A Jim Jarmusch has been his primary helmer, featuring him as a cheerful, jailed Italian tourist in New Orleans in "Down by Law" (1986), a talkative Roman cabbie in "Night on Earth" (1991) and half the cast (opposite comedian Steven Wright) of "Coffee and Cigarettes" (1986), a six-minute comedy short which Benigni co-wrote with Jarmusch and Wright. He may have been more widely seen in "Blake Edwards' Son of the Pink Panther" (1993), a failed effort to revive the lucrative "Pink Panther" series. Playing the illegitimate son of Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, Benigni was as enthusiastic as ever but the story was weak and much of the humor heartless.
Writing about Jarmusch's "Down by Law", Roger Ebert raved, "The discovery in the picture is the redoubtable Roberto Benigni, who has an irrepressible, infectious manner and is absolutely delighted to be himself. . . He's like a show-off kid who gets you laughing and then starts laughing at himself, he's so funny, and then tries to top himself no matter what." In addition to such usual comedy suspects as Charlie Chaplain and Buster Keaton, Benigni has drawn inspiration from French film comics Jacques Tati and Louis de Funes.
Benigni's successful career in his native Italy skyrocketed in the 1990s with two wildly successful comedies about mistaken identity: "Johnny Stecchino" (1991) and "The Monster" (1994; US release 1996). The first, presenting the funny man in dual roles as an innocent bus driver and a notorious mobster, displaced Bernardo Bertolucci's 1972 "Last Tango in Paris" as Italy all-time domestic box-office champ. "Johnny Stecchino", in turn, was supplanted by "The Monster" in which Benigni played a harmless small-time con man wrongly suspected of being a serial killer. The red-hot comic co-wrote and directed both films and made his producing debut on the latter. Both were being developed as Hollywood remakes as of the spring of 1996. At the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, Benigni received the Grand Prix for his somewhat sentimental "La Vita e Bella/Life Is Beautiful", about a man trying to shield his child from the horrors of the Holocaust. The film proved a critical and art-house hit, becoming the highest-grossing foreign film and earning a record seven Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture, Best Foreign-Language Film, and three for Benigni for his acting, direction and as co-scenarist, the most for a non-English-language movie. The irrespressible Benigni went on to triumph as Best Actor and also took home the statue for Best Foreign Film.