Marcello Mastroianni Trivia
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59 free Marcello Mastroianni trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Marcello Mastroianni trivia quiz covers Italy's most iconic leading man from the carpenter's son of Fontana Liri to the darkened Trevi Fountain of December 1996: the escape from a German camp, Big Deal on Madonna Street, La Dolce Vita and 8½ with Fellini, Divorce Italian Style, White Nights, La Notte, The 10th Victim, City of Women, Ginger and Fred and Dark Eyes. It also covers the eleven films with Sophia Loren, the three Oscar nominations and two Cannes prizes, Faye Dunaway and Catherine Deneuve, his daughters Barbara and Chiara, the wife he never divorced, his late roles for Tornatore, Angelopoulos and Altman, and the honours Italy gave him. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation. Enjoy this one? Try our Sophia Loren, Federico Fellini and Italian Cinema quizzes next.
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Q 01What job does Mastroianni's character hold in La Dolce Vita?
A gossip journalist
A gossip journalist. He chronicles the scandals of Rome's café society while a friend urges him to finish the serious book he keeps putting off, and he never does.
Q 02Which Swedish actress plays Sylvia, the visiting film star Mastroianni's character pursues around Rome in La Dolce Vita?
Anita Ekberg
Anita Ekberg. The role fixed her image for life: she settled in Italy, and decades later she was still living in a villa in the countryside outside Rome.
Q 03In which notorious 1973 film do Mastroianni and three friends gather to eat themselves to death?
La Grande Bouffe
La Grande Bouffe. Marco Ferreri's satire was jeered at the 1973 Cannes festival in one of its biggest scandals, yet it left with the international critics' prize.
Q 04Mastroianni played Meursault in a 1967 film of The Stranger, a novel by which French writer?
Albert Camus
Albert Camus. Mastroianni plays Meursault, who shoots a man on an Algiers beach and finds the court condemns him less for the killing than for not weeping at his mother's funeral.
Q 05What business did Mastroianni's father run?
A carpentry shop
A carpentry shop. His father, a cabinetmaker, put Marcello to work there as a boy; he later went blind from diabetes and had to ask his wife what was happening on cinema screens.
Q 06What happened to Mastroianni during World War II?
He escaped a German prison camp and hid in Venice
He escaped a German prison camp and hid in Venice. Put to work drawing maps, he was sent on to a German-run labour camp in the Alps, got away and sat out the war in near poverty.
Q 07In which 1958 caper comedy does Mastroianni help bungle a pawn-shop burglary?
Big Deal on Madonna Street
Big Deal on Madonna Street. After breaking through the wrong wall, the gang lands in a kitchen instead of the pawnshop, gives up on the safe and sits down to eat the pasta and chickpeas.
Q 08What is the name of Mastroianni's character in La Dolce Vita?
Marcello Rubini
Marcello Rubini. The film's first producer wanted Paul Newman for the part, but Fellini held out for Mastroianni, telling him he needed an ordinary face.
Q 09In which Roman fountain does Mastroianni wade in a famous night scene from La Dolce Vita?
The Trevi Fountain
The Trevi Fountain. When he died in 1996, Rome shut off its water, dimmed its lights and hung it with black drapes in his honour.
Q 10Which everyday word comes from the name of a character in La Dolce Vita?
Paparazzi
Paparazzi. The film's pushy news photographer is called Paparazzo, a surname Fellini is said to have lifted from George Gissing's travel book By the Ionian Sea.
Q 11Which prize did La Dolce Vita win at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival?
The Palme d'Or
The Palme d'Or. It won at Cannes only three months after Italian politicians had lined up to attack the film at home, and some countries went on to ban it outright.
Q 12What is the name of the film director Mastroianni plays in 8½?
Guido Anselmi
Guido Anselmi. In a big hat and dark-rimmed glasses he was so plainly standing in for Fellini that he was known from then on as the director's alter ego.
Q 13Besides costume design, which Oscar did 8½ win?
Best Foreign Language Film
Best Foreign Language Film. Fellini had lost the thread of his film and was about to abandon it when the answer came to him: make it about a director who can no longer remember the film he wanted to make.
Q 21Dark Eyes (1987) was inspired by stories by which Russian writer?
Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov. It was a homecoming: in the 1950s Mastroianni had made his name on stage in Three Sisters and as the doctor Astrov in Uncle Vanya, decades before this film wove several of the stories together.
Q 22Who directed Dark Eyes?
Nikita Mikhalkov
Nikita Mikhalkov. His film has Mastroianni tell a stranger on a ship the story of his one great love, and only at the end do we learn the once-rich charmer is now the ship's waiter.
Q 23Which director paired Loren and Mastroianni in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and Marriage Italian Style?
Vittorio De Sica
Q 14The title of Mastroianni's film Allonsanfàn mangles the opening words of which anthem?
La Marseillaise
La Marseillaise. It opens 'Allons enfants'; in the 1974 film Mastroianni plays an aristocrat in Restoration Italy who, weary of the cause, keeps betraying his fellow revolutionaries.
Q 15Which Hollywood star plays the American businessman who visits Naples opposite Mastroianni in Macaroni (1985)?
Jack Lemmon
Jack Lemmon. Like Mastroianni, he won Best Actor at Cannes twice; here his burnt-out executive returns to the city of a wartime romance and is won over by her brother's sprawling family.
Q 16For which 1970 film opposite Monica Vitti did Mastroianni win his first Cannes prize?
The Pizza Triangle
The Pizza Triangle. His Roman bricklayer loses his flower-seller lover to a young pizza cook, and most of the story is told as testimony at the trial that follows.
Q 17What scheme does Mastroianni's Sicilian baron hatch to be rid of his wife in Divorce Italian Style?
Push her into an affair
Push her into an affair. Divorce was illegal in Italy, but a husband who killed an unfaithful wife to save his honour could expect a light sentence, so he sets out to find her a lover.
Q 18Who directed Divorce Italian Style?
Pietro Germi
Pietro Germi. Until then he was known for sober social dramas; this black farce marked his switch to satire and won him an Oscar for the script.
Q 19A Special Day is set in Rome on the day of which 1938 event?
Hitler's visit to Mussolini
Hitler's visit to Mussolini. Nearly everyone in the vast apartment block goes off to cheer the parade, and the two neighbours left behind meet when her pet bird escapes to his window.
Q 20Who directed A Special Day?
Ettore Scola
Ettore Scola. He confined the whole story to one real 1930s housing complex in Rome, the Palazzo Federici, and went back to film there again almost twenty years later.
Vittorio De Sica. Two decades earlier, a teenage Mastroianni had slipped into De Sica's wartime drama The Children Are Watching Us as an uncredited extra.
Q 24In Marriage Italian Style, how does Loren's character trick Mastroianni's into marrying her?
Fakes her deathbed
Fakes her deathbed. His long-time mistress stages a deathbed wedding, then springs out of bed as his lawful wife, a plot taken from Eduardo De Filippo's play Filumena Marturano.
Q 25In which city was La Notte (1961), starring Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau, filmed?
Milan
Milan. The film trails a successful novelist and his wife through one day and night in the booming city, from a sick friend's hospital bed to a millionaire's all-night party, as their marriage quietly gives out.
Q 26White Nights (1957), starring Mastroianni, adapts a story by which Russian author?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky. The film moves his St Petersburg story to the Italian port of Livorno, where a lonely newcomer falls for a woman who waits on a canal bridge for a lover gone a year.
Q 27In a late Fellini film, Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina play ageing impersonators of which Hollywood duo?
Astaire and Rogers
Astaire and Rogers. Ginger Rogers took the film's title, Ginger and Fred, to the American courts, claiming it traded on her name, and lost.
Q 28What is the name of Mastroianni's character in Fellini's City of Women?
Snàporaz
Snàporaz. He follows a stranger off a train and blunders into a hotel hosting a feminist convention, where the dream turns into a trial of his whole attitude to women.
Q 29In which 1965 science-fiction film does Mastroianni star opposite Ursula Andress?
The 10th Victim
The 10th Victim. In its future, a worldwide game called the Big Hunt licenses players to kill one another, hunter against victim, as the state's substitute for war.
Q 30In Everybody's Fine (1990), whom does Mastroianni's Sicilian cross Italy to surprise?
His children
His children. He named all five after opera characters and finds each hiding a disappointing life; Hollywood remade the story in 2009 with Robert De Niro in his role.