Italian comedians

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 26. Chapters: Vittorio De Sica, Beppe Grillo, Pippo Franco, Totò, Massimo Boldi, Adriano Celentano, Sabina Guzzanti, Enrico Montesano, Paolo Villaggio, Aldo Fabrizi, Christian De Sica, Gioele Dix, Ezio Greggio, Diego Abatantuono, Gigi Proietti, Raimondo Vianello, Gino Bramieri, Gene Gnocchi, Antonio Albanese, Adolfo Margiotta, Sandra Mondaini, Nino Taranto, Clara Campi, Tammy Pescatelli, Andrea Rivera, Franco Franchi, Ciccio Ingrassia, Aldo, Giovanni & Giacomo. Excerpt: Vittorio De Sica (7 July 1901 or 1902 - 13 November 1974) was an Italian director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement. Born into poverty in Sora, Lazio (in either 1901 or 1902 - sources are divided), he began his career as a theatre actor in the early 1920s and joined Tatiana Pavlova's theatre company in 1923. In 1933 he founded his own company with his wife Giuditta Rissone and Sergio Tofano. The company performed mostly light comedies, but they also staged plays by Beaumarchais, and worked with famous directors like Luchino Visconti. His meeting with Cesare Zavattini was a very important event: together they created some of the most celebrated films of the neorealistic age, like Sciuscià (Shoeshine) and Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, released as The Bicycle Thief in the U.S.A.), both of which De Sica directed. De Sica is more well-known in the UK for appearing in the TV series The Four Just Men produced by Sapphire Films and distributed by ITC Entertainment, originally broadcast in 1959. His passion for gambling is very well known. Because of it, he often found himself losing very big sums of money and it probably also explains his participation to movies which were not really worth his presence. He never made this passion a mistery to anyone; in fact, he projected it on many characters in his own movies like, for example "The Count Max" or "Naples' Gold". In 1937 he married with Giuditta Rissone, whom he met ten years before and who gave birth to his daughter, Emi. In 1942, on the set of Un garibaldino al convento he met the spanish actress Maria Mercader (sister to Ramon Mercader, Trotsky's assassin), with whom he consequently started a relationship. After divorcing Rissone, in Mexico in 1954, always in Mexico,in 1959 he remarried with Mercader, but this union was not considered valid because of the Italian law. In 1968 he obtained French citizenship and married Mercader in Paris. During that time, he had already had two more sons from