45 Facts About Fellini

Federico Fellini, was an Italian film director and screenwriter known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness.

Fellini is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.

Fellini was nominated for 16 Academy Awards over the course of his career, winning a total of four in the category of Best Foreign Language Film .

Fellini received an honorary award for Lifetime Achievement at the 65th Academy Awards in Los Angeles.

Fellini won the Palme d'Or for La Dolce Vita in 1960, two times the Moscow International Film Festival in 1963 and 1987, and the Career Golden Lion at the 42nd Venice International Film Festival in 1985.

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Fellini was born on 20 January 1920, to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea.

Fellini's father, Urbano Fellini, born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory.

In 1924, Fellini started primary school in an institute run by the nuns of San Vincenzo in Rimini, attending the Carlo Tonni public school two years later.

Fellini visited Rome with his parents for the first time in 1933, the year of the maiden voyage of the transatlantic ocean liner SS Rex .

In 1937, Fellini opened Febo, a portrait shop in Rimini, with the painter Demos Bonini.

Fellini eventually found work as a cub reporter on the dailies Il Piccolo and Il Popolo di Roma, but quit after a short stint, bored by the local court news assignments.

Not yet twenty and with Fabrizi's help, Fellini obtained his first screen credit as a comedy writer on Mario Mattoli's Il pirata sono io .

In November 1942, Fellini was sent to Libya, occupied by Fascist Italy, to work on the screenplay of I cavalieri del deserto, directed by Osvaldo Valenti and Gino Talamo.

Fellini welcomed the assignment as it allowed him "to secure another extension on his draft order".

Apolitical Fellini was finally freed of the draft when an Allied air raid over Bologna destroyed his medical records.

Fellini's gave birth to a son, Pierfederico, on 22 March 1945, but the child died of encephalitis 11 days later on 2 April 1945.

Fellini became involved with Italian Neorealism when Roberto Rossellini, at work on Stories of Yesteryear, met Fellini in his shop, and proposed he contribute gags and dialogue for the script.

Fellini worked with Rossellini on the anthology film L'Amore, co-writing the screenplay and in one segment titled, "The Miracle", acting opposite Anna Magnani.

In 1950 Fellini co-produced and co-directed with Alberto Lattuada Variety Lights, his first feature film.

One reviewer declared that Fellini had "not the slightest aptitude for cinema direction".

Fellini directed La Strada based on a script completed in 1952 with Pinelli and Flaiano.

Fellini cast American actor Broderick Crawford to interpret the role of an aging swindler in Il Bidone.

Bernhard recommended that Fellini consult the I Ching and keep a record of his dreams.

Fellini told her that he hoped to convey the three levels "on which our minds live: the past, the present, and the conditional — the realm of fantasy".

In 1964, Fellini took LSD under the supervision of Emilio Servadio, his psychoanalyst during the 1954 production of La Strada.

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Fellini met with film director Paul Mazursky who wanted to star him alongside Donald Sutherland in his new film, Alex in Wonderland.

In March 1971, Fellini began production on Roma, a seemingly random collection of episodes informed by the director's memories and impressions of Rome.

Under the title, I disegni di Fellini, he published 350 drawings executed in pencil, watercolours, and felt pens.

On 6 September 1985 Fellini was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 42nd Venice Film Festival.

Long fascinated by Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Fellini accompanied the Peruvian author on a journey to the Yucatan to assess the feasibility of a film.

In early 1989 Fellini began production on The Voice of the Moon, based on Ermanno Cavazzoni's novel, Il poema dei lunatici .

Fellini improvised as he filmed, using as a guide a rough treatment written with Pinelli.

Fellini won the Praemium Imperiale, an international prize in the visual arts given by the Japan Art Association in 1990.

In July 1991 and April 1992, Fellini worked in close collaboration with Canadian filmmaker Damian Pettigrew to establish "the longest and most detailed conversations ever recorded on film".

Fellini suffered a second stroke and fell into an irreversible coma.

Fellini died in Rome on 31 October 1993 at the age of 73 after a heart attack he suffered a few weeks earlier, a day after his 50th wedding anniversary.

Fellini was raised in a Roman Catholic family and considered himself a Catholic, but avoided formal activity in the Catholic Church.

Fellini's films include Catholic themes; some celebrate Catholic teachings, while others criticize or ridicule church dogma.

Fellini preferred to move within the world of the moderate left, and voted for the Italian Republican Party of his friend Ugo La Malfa as well as the reformist socialists of Pietro Nenni, another friend of his, and voted only once for the Christian Democrats in 1976 to keep the Communists out of power.

Apart from satirizing Silvio Berlusconi and mainstream television in Ginger and Fred, Fellini rarely expressed political views in public and never directed an overtly political film.

Fellini directed two electoral television spots during the 1990s: one for DC and another for the Italian Republican Party .

Personal and highly idiosyncratic visions of society, Fellini's films are a unique combination of memory, dreams, fantasy and desire.

Fellini's work influenced the American TV shows Northern Exposure and Third Rock from the Sun.

Various film-related material and personal papers of Fellini are in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives, to which scholars and media experts have full access.

In 2014 the weekly entertainment-trade magazine Variety announced that French director Sylvain Chomet was moving forward with The Thousand Miles, a project based on various Fellini works, including his unpublished drawings and writings.

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