Roberto Benigni

After charming the arthouse set with his seminal work with Jim Jarmusch and wowing international audiences with a series of broad, lowbrow comedies, Roberto Benigni conquered these United States with 1998's Life Is Beautiful, a dodgy-sounding crowd-pleasing comedy-drama about hope and family during the Holocaust that made Benigni a household name and garnered him an Academy Award for Best Actor. The United States' love affair with the excitable Italian proved short-lived: Pinocchio flopped and his follow-up, 2005's The Tiger And the Snow, was barely released theatrically. Now Benigni is set to conquer America all over again with TuttoDante (Everything Dante) a one-man show about Dante's The Divine Comedy. Expect plenty of goofball pop-culture riffing and live wire energy in this epic exercise in free-associative rambling.

Updated 06/11/2009