50 Fun Facts About Federico Fellini

In which Italian city was Federico Fellini born in 1920?

Rimini runs through his films, yet he barely shot a frame there: for Amarcord, his portrait of the town in the 1930s, he had its streets rebuilt on a studio lot in Rome.

Which Canadian actor played the title role in Fellini's Casanova in 1976?

Donald Sutherland got the part only after Fellini fell out with a producer who wanted Robert Redford; the director then had the actor's face rebuilt with a false nose and chin.

Which Rome street, where photographers stalked visiting film stars, is the hub of the nightlife in La Dolce Vita?

Via Veneto was where real photographers chased the stars in the 1950s; the film's own snapper, Paparazzo, left his surname to every celebrity-hunting photographer since.

Giulietta Masina's Gelsomina in La Strada was widely compared to the work of which silent-film star?

Charlie Chaplin returned the compliment, calling Masina the actress who moved him most; one French critic wrote that her Gelsomina drew on the best of his work yet felt freshly invented.

Which Hollywood star played the brutish strongman Zampanò in La Strada?

Anthony Quinn was playing Attila the Hun for the same producers that year and, by his own account, shot both at once: Zampanò at dawn, the Hun in the afternoon, looking haggard in each.

Which composer wrote the scores for Fellini's films, including the circus marches of 8½?

Nino Rota scored Fellini's films from The White Sheik on for the rest of his life. His Godfather music lost its Oscar nomination because he had reused a tune from Fortunella, an earlier comedy Fellini co-wrote.

Which actor starred as tabloid journalist Rubini in La Dolce Vita and as Guido in 8½?

Marcello Mastroianni recalled Fellini telling him why he, and not the Hollywood star the money wanted, had the first of those parts: Paul Newman was too beautiful, and he had 'the face of normal'.

Which famous Rome landmark do Marcello and Sylvia wade into in La Dolce Vita?

Earlier that evening they dance in the Baths of Caracalla before slipping away from her bored fiancé.

Which Swedish-born actress played the film star Sylvia in Fellini's La Dolce Vita?

Anita Ekberg, who played a star mobbed by photographers, turned on the real ones the same year: followed home to her Rome villa, she came out to face them with a bow and arrow.

What does the title Amarcord mean in Fellini's native Romagnol dialect?

"I remember" is the dialect phrase a m'arcord run together, and the word outgrew the film: Italian dictionaries now list amarcord as a noun for any fond, nostalgic look back.

Fellini Satyricon (1969) is loosely based on a bawdy ancient novel by which Roman writer?

Petronius's novel survives only in fragments, and Fellini built that into the film: it is deliberately broken up, with episodes that start and stop without warning like the surviving text.

Which crime novelist chaired the 1960 Cannes jury that gave La Dolce Vita the Palme d'Or?

Georges Simenon, the creator of Maigret, did more than hand over the prize: he and Fellini became friends, and their letters to each other were later published as a book.

Fellini's La Strada won the first-ever Academy Award in which category?

Best Foreign Language Film had only just become a competitive Oscar; until then foreign films were handed honorary awards, with no nominees. Fellini's Nights of Cabiria won it the following year.

Fellini's Nights of Cabiria was adapted into which Broadway musical, later filmed by Bob Fosse?

Sweet Charity moved the story from Rome to New York and softened it: Fellini's hopeful streetwalker became a dance-hall hostess, played by Gwen Verdon on stage and Shirley MacLaine on film.

Fellini's film about a blocked director inspired which 1982 Broadway musical by Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit?

Nine adapts 8½: it keeps the film's blocked hero and makes him the only substantial male role among a stage full of women. It won the Tony for Best Musical and was filmed in 2009 with Daniel Day-Lewis.

Which neorealist director recruited the young Fellini to help write Rome, Open City?

Roberto Rossellini's film became the calling card of Italian neorealism, and its script brought Fellini an Oscar nomination years before he directed anything himself.

Fellini played a wanderer mistaken for Saint Joseph in the 1948 film The Miracle, acting opposite which Italian actress?

Anna Magnani played the peasant, and Fellini bleached his black hair blond for the part. New York banned the film as sacrilege, and the case led the US Supreme Court to rule in 1952 that films are protected speech.

Fellini made his name in wartime Rome on the staff of the magazine Marc'Aurelio as what?

A cartoonist and gag writer: the magazine's staff was a nursery for Italian cinema, and the jokes he sold there led straight to his first screen credits, as a comedy writer.

Fellini met his future wife while she was voicing which character in his wartime radio serial?

Pallina was half of Cico and Pallina, the young newlyweds of his radio sketches; before the serial had run its course, its writer and his leading lady were a married couple themselves.

Which film, co-directed with Alberto Lattuada, was Fellini's first feature as a director?

Variety Lights was paid for by a cooperative of the two directors and their actress wives; it failed at the box office, left them in debt for years and ended their partnership.

Fellini's first solo-directed feature, The White Sheik, starred which comic actor in the title role?

Alberto Sordi played the sheik as a seedy photo-romance heart-throb. The film flopped, and when Fellini wanted him again a year later the producers balked, and the director had to fight to keep him.

Which 1953 film about small-town layabouts won Fellini a Silver Lion and his first real success?

I Vitelloni rescued a career that had opened with two flops: it was Fellini's first hit with critics and audiences alike, and it won him his first distributor outside Italy.

Asked in 1963 for his ten favourite films, which American director put Fellini's tale of provincial layabouts first?

Stanley Kubrick gave the list to the American magazine Cinema with Fellini's film at its head; the same film later fed Scorsese's Mean Streets and George Lucas's American Graffiti.

In Fellini's Il Bidone, what do the swindlers dress up as to con poor farmers out of their savings?

Priests: the gang, led by the Hollywood actor Broderick Crawford, turn up at poor farms in cassocks, spin the families a tale and drive off with their savings.

Which poet and future director translated Nights of Cabiria's dialogue into Roman dialect?

Pier Paolo Pasolini knew the slang at first hand: his novel about the street boys of Rome's slums had just earned him an obscenity trial, and Fellini hired him to make the dialogue ring true.

Which producer wanted Paul Newman for La Dolce Vita and sold the rights when Fellini held out for his own choice?

Dino De Laurentiis had produced Nights of Cabiria, but he let this one go rather than gamble on a little-known lead; the publisher who bought it ended up with a film that broke Italy's box-office records.

What does a helicopter carry over Rome in the opening scene of Fellini's La Dolce Vita?

A statue of Christ is on its way to the Vatican, but the hero's news helicopter, tailing it, peels off so he can try to get phone numbers from women sunbathing on a roof; the rotors drown him out.

Fellini's 'Toby Dammit', his part of the 1968 anthology film Spirits of the Dead, loosely adapts a tale by which writer?

Edgar Allan Poe's comic tale Never Bet the Devil Your Head became the last days of a drunken English actor, played by Terence Stamp, who is lured to Rome by the promise of a Ferrari.

Which title did Ennio Flaiano suggest for the film that eventually became 8½?

La bella confusione, 'the beautiful confusion', suited a film about creative paralysis, but Fellini's producers wanted a title at once and he simply numbered it, like an opus, by the tally of films he had made.

To please his parents, Fellini enrolled at Rome's university in 1939 to study what, though he never sat an exam?

Law it was, on paper only: one biographer found no record that he ever attended a class, and within months he was selling his work to a Rome magazine instead.

What genre of movie is Guido struggling to make in 8½?

Science fiction: all the production has to show is a towering launch pad for a spaceship, built on a beach, where the hero is hauled before the press with nothing to say about his film.

Late in his career Fellini directed a television commercial for which Italian pasta maker?

Barilla got its Fellini spot in the mid-1980s, even as he campaigned against channels chopping films up with advertising under a slogan of his own: 'You don't interrupt an emotion.'

Fellini began keeping a diary of his dreams in the 1960s after discovering the ideas of which psychologist?

Carl Jung reached him through a Jungian analyst in Rome, who told him to keep a record of his dreams; Fellini kept it up for some thirty years, and the notebooks became raw material for his films.

Which film, starring his wife as a betrayed housewife, was Fellini's first feature in colour?

Juliet of the Spirits followed his own dabbling in séances and a supervised LSD session; in the film, the visions that plague its heroine end up giving her the strength to leave a faithless husband.

In Fellini's segment of Boccaccio '70, a moral crusader wages war on a giant billboard of a film star advertising what?

Milk, of all things: the prude who rails at the poster is tormented when its star steps down from it as a giantess. The film was Fellini's reply to the churchmen who had condemned La Dolce Vita.

In Fellini's Amarcord, the whole town rows out to sea one night to watch what go by?

An ocean liner, the Rex, pride of Fascist Italy: the townspeople fall asleep in their boats waiting, wake to its foghorn, gaze up in awe, and are tipped into the sea by its wake.

Amarcord's teenage hero is often taken for young Fellini, but on whom was he modelled?

A childhood friend, Luigi 'Titta' Benzi, who grew up to be a lawyer and stayed close to Fellini for life; the director insisted that the memories in his films were mostly invented.

The most famous sequence in Fellini's Roma (1972) is a surreal fashion show of what?

Church vestments parade down a catwalk for a cardinal in a princess's palace, ending with an outfit for the pope himself: Fellini's mockery of a Vatican that had kept condemning his films.

Which comedian starred as Ivo Salvini in Fellini's final film, The Voice of the Moon?

Roberto Benigni's moonstruck innocent was written as part Pinocchio, and by his own account the two men talked of filming the puppet's story together; Benigni made it without him in 2002, playing the title role.

Fellini's 1986 satire Ginger and Fred took aim at which powerful Italian?

Silvio Berlusconi appears in thin disguise as 'Cavalier Lombardoni', owner of the private channel whose tawdry Christmas special, half variety show and half advertising, swallows the film's two old dancers.

Fellini's unmade film Viaggio a Tulum, later a Milo Manara comic, grew from his fascination with which author's books?

Carlos Castaneda, whose books about a Yaqui sorcerer had fascinated Fellini, disappeared as the project took shape and the film fell through; Fellini turned the fiasco into a script that Milo Manara drew as a comic.

Where did Fellini lie in state in 1993?

Studio 5 at Cinecittà was his favourite soundstage, the vast shed where he had shot La Dolce Vita, so Rome said goodbye to him on his own set; the state funeral followed in a basilica.

Fellini died on 31 October 1993, one day after which personal milestone?

His 50th wedding anniversary to Giulietta Masina passed with him in a coma from which he never woke, and she outlived him by only five months.

In Fellini's And the Ship Sails On, which lovesick animal is found languishing in the ship's hold?

A rhinoceros, winched on deck to be hosed down, is the oddest passenger on a 1914 cruise of opera lovers who have sailed to scatter the ashes of the greatest soprano of the age.

Fellini's 1970 film for Italian television is a half-documentary tribute to which performers of his childhood?

Circus clowns had thrilled and frightened him as a boy, so he took a camera crew around Italy and Paris to find the last of the great ones; Italian television showed the result on Christmas Day.

Which actress plays the hero's vision of the ideal woman in Fellini's 8½, a film star who shares her first name?

Claudia Cardinale was heard on screen for the first time in 8½: until then Italian producers had always dubbed her, judging her husky, accented voice unfit for a leading lady.

Which Hollywood dancer sued, and lost, over the title of Fellini's 1986 film about two ageing dance impersonators?

Ginger Rogers argued the title traded on her name; the judges ruled that a film's title is part of its artistic expression, and the 'Rogers test' they devised became a landmark for American trademark disputes.

Which Italian actress read out the citation as Fellini received his honorary Oscar in 1993?

Sophia Loren read the citation, and Fellini thanked only one person by name, his wife in the audience: 'Thank you, dearest Giulietta, and please, stop crying.'

Which Franz Kafka novel is Fellini shown adapting in his 1987 film Intervista?

Amerika is only the pretext: the adaptation never gets made, and the film drifts instead into Fellini's own past, reuniting the two stars of La Dolce Vita to watch their younger selves in its most famous scene.

What did Fellini's father, Urbano, do for a living?

A travelling salesman in groceries, Urbano was a poor match in the eyes of his wife's well-off Roman family: she had eloped with him against their wishes.