Name	Roberto Benigni
Height	5' 6"
Naionality	Italian
Date of Birth	27 October 1952
Place of Birth	Misericordia, Arezzo, Tuscany, Italy
Famous for

His first experiences as a theatre actor took place in 1972, in Prato. During that autumn he moved to Florence where he took part in some experimental theatre shows, some of which he also directed. In 1975, Benigni had his first theatrical success with Cioni Mario di Gaspare fu Giulia, written by Giuseppe Bertolucci.

Benigni became famous in Italy in the 1970s for a shocking TV series called Onda Libera, on RAI2, by Renzo Arbore, in which he interpreted the satirical piece "anthem of the melt body" (L'inno del corpo sciolto, a hymn to defecation).[citation needed] A great scandal for the time, the series was suspended due to censorship. His first film was 1977's Berlinguer ti voglio bene, also by Giuseppe Bertolucci.

Afterwards, he appeared during a public political demonstration of the Italian Communist Party, of which he was a sympathiser, and in this occasion he took in his arms and dangled the national leader Enrico Berlinguer, a very serious figure. It was an unprecedented act, given that until that moment Italian politicians were proverbially serious and formal (and Berlinguer was perhaps the most serious of them all). It represented a breaking point, after which politicians experimented with newer habits and "public manners", attended fewer formal events and, generally speaking, modified their lifestyle in order to exhibit a more popular behaviour. Benigni was censored again in the 1980s for calling the Pope John Paul II something impolite during an important live TV show ("Wojtylaccio", meaning "Bad Wojtyla" in Italian).

His popularity increased with another Arbore's show, L'altra domenica (1978), in which Benigni portrayed a lazy film critic who has never watched the film for which he is called to review.