Federico Fellini Biography
Federico Fellini was born in Rimini in 1920. Federico attended the city's classical high school but studying didn't do much for him. He then began to earn his first small earnings as a caricaturist: the manager of the Fulgor cinema, in fact, commissioned portraits of famous actors from him to be exhibited as an attraction. In the summer of 1937 Fellini founded, in partnership with the painter Demos Bonini, the "Febo" workshop, where the two created caricatures of holidaymakers. During 1938 he developed a sort of epistolary collaboration with newspapers and magazines, as a cartoonist: the "Domenica del Corriere" published a dozen of them in the column "Postcards from the public", while with the Florentine weekly "420" the relationship became more professional and continues until it overlaps with the first period of "Marc'Aurelio". In these years Federico Fellini already lived permanently in Rome, where he moved in January 1939. From the very beginning, he frequented the world of vaudeville and radio, where he met, among others, Aldo Fabrizi, Erminio Macario and Marcello Marchesi, and starts writing scripts and gags. On the radio, in 1943, he also met Giulietta Masina who was playing the character of Pallina, created by Fellini himself. During the war years he collaborated on the screenplays of a series of good quality titles, including "Avanti c'è posto" and "Campo de' fiore" by Mario Bonnard and "Chi l'ha visto?" by Goffredo Alessandrini, while immediately afterwards he was among the protagonists of neorealism, writing some of the most important works of that cinematographic school: with Rossellini, for example, he wrote the masterpieces "Roma Città Aperta" and "Paisà", with Germi in the name of the law. The following year Fellini directed his first film alone, "The White Sheik". With “I vitelloni“, however, (we are in 1953), his name crossed national borders and became known abroad. In this film, the director turns for the first time to his memories, to his adolescence in Rimini and his extravagant and pathetic characters. With “La Dolce Vita” (1959), the Palme d'Or at Cannes and a watershed moment in Fellini's production, interest in a cinema not tied to traditional narrative structures increased. In the spring of 1993, a few months before his death, Fellini received his fifth Oscar, for lifetime achievement. Federico Fellini died in Rome of a heart attack on 31 October 1993 at the age of 73.
