Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini was an Italian film director and screenwriter whose work between the late 1940s and the early 1990s helped define European art cinema and made him one of the most-recognized filmmakers of the 20th century. He was born on January 20, 1920, in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, and moved to Rome in 1939, where he worked as a cartoonist and journalist before entering film.

He began in cinema as a screenwriter, collaborating with Roberto Rossellini on the neorealist landmarks Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946). His early directorial features I Vitelloni (1953) and La Strada (1954) — the latter starring his wife Giulietta Masina — won the first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and established the blend of neorealism and personal fantasy that would mark his work.

His 1960 film La Dolce Vita, starring Marcello Mastroianni as a tabloid journalist drifting through Rome's nightlife, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and gave the word "paparazzi" to the English language. He followed it with 8½ (1963), a self-reflective portrait of a blocked filmmaker that won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and is widely placed among the greatest films ever made. Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Amarcord (1973) and Fellini's Casanova (1976) extended his reputation.

He won four Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film and received an honorary Oscar in 1993 for lifetime achievement. He died in Rome on October 31, 1993, the day after his 50th wedding anniversary; Giulietta Masina died five months later. His name has entered the language as the adjective "Felliniesque," describing dreamlike, baroque, carnivalesque imagery.

His name Federico is the Italian and Spanish form of Frederick, from the Germanic Friduric meaning "peaceful ruler" — from frid ("peace") and ric ("ruler, power"). It is a masculine name long established across the Romance-language world.