Federico Fellini insisted his famously autobiographical films were almost entirely invented
Federico Fellini filled his films with Rimini boyhood: a stranded sea creature, an ocean liner, school friends. Yet he rejected the autobiographical label, saying he had invented nearly everything, even his childhood and his memories, for the pleasure of telling them. He also won a record four foreign-language Oscars.
Fellini was born in Rimini, then a small Adriatic town, on 20 January 1920. His father was a travelling salesman from peasant stock; his mother came from a Roman merchant family that bitterly opposed the match, so the couple eloped in 1917. As a boy he drew, staged puppet shows and devoured a children's magazine reprinting American comic strips. Happy Hooligan later inspired the look of Gelsomina in La Strada, and the first film he ever saw, Maciste in Hell, stayed with him for life.
Real events did seep into the work. A giant fish washed up on a Rimini beach in a 1934 storm became the creature that ends La Dolce Vita, and his school friend Luigi Titta Benzi became young Titta in Amarcord. School bored him; he once racked up 67 absences in a year. He enrolled in law at Rome's Sapienza University to please his parents, though one biographer found no sign he ever went to a class.
Humour writing was his way in. The satirical magazine Marc'Aurelio gave him steady work from 1939 to 1942 and introduced him to future collaborators, and the comic actor Aldo Fabrizi helped him to his first screen credit before he turned twenty. In 1942 he met Giulietta Masina, the voice of his radio character Pallina; they married in October 1943, after an Allied raid on Bologna destroyed his medical records and freed him from the draft. Their only son died eleven days after birth in 1945.
After Rome's liberation he drew caricatures of American soldiers, and Roberto Rossellini, visiting the shop, recruited him to write for Rome, Open City, which brought Fellini an Oscar nomination. His debut feature, Variety Lights, co-directed with Alberto Lattuada, bankrupted its producers and left both men in debt for over a decade. Later triumphs included La Dolce Vita, which won the Palme d'Or in 1960, and 8 and a half, ranked by Sight and Sound among the ten greatest films.
Source: Federico Fellini
