Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini (1920-1993), Italian film director, noted for such films as La Strada (1954) and 8½ (1963). He was born in Rimini. In 1938 he left his birthplace for Florence and Rome, where he worked as a writer and cartoonist and toured with a theater company. One of his first significant film ventures was a collaboration with the Italian film director Roberto Rossellini on the script of Open City (1945). Fellini then worked as a screenwriter and assistant director on several films before codirecting Variety Lights (1951) with Alberto Lattuada. He then directed The White Sheik (1952). Although these first two films were unsuccessful, his next film, I Vitelloni (1953) won international acclaim. It was the first of his probing, neorealistic studies of young drifters, circus people, and prostitutes. La Strada and Nights of Cabiria (1957), both starring his wife, Giulietta Masina, won Academy Awards for best foreign film. Fellini's subsequent films became more autobiographical and surrealistic, often incorporating spectacular and grotesque elements and forsaking linear narrative, to express subjectively the characters' experiences and thoughts. He usually has written or cowritten his screenplays. The films 8½ and Amarcord (1974) won two more Academy Awards for best foreign film. The former portrays a filmmaker's quest for self-understanding; the latter reflects Fellini's childhood memories. Among his other films are La Dolce Vita (1960), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Fellini Satyricon (1969), The Clowns (1970), City of Women (1981), And the Ship Sails On (1983), and Ginger and Fred (1986).