On March 22, 1921, Nino Manfredi was born in Castro dei Volsci, the most Italian Ciociaro that has ever existed, the sad comedian inside - a white clown - who was able to conquer the general public and great directors with the same apparent simplicity of his friend. next door.
The native province of Saturnino Manfredi was called at that time "land and work" (today in the Frosinone area) and this could sound the perfect motto for his art, mixed with tenacity, concreteness, sweat.
But the soul is more sensitive, lonely and secret.
He is the son of peasants even if his father later earned the police marshal's stripes by obtaining the transfer to Rome.
Nino is the eldest son but does not seem to bode well: he escapes several times from the religious college where he was enrolled as a semiconvictor, contracts tuberculosis, grows up in a sanatorium and here, thanks to a performance by De Sica's theater company, falls in love with acting .
Healed, he enrolled in university, but spends his evenings acting in a parish theater.
After 8 September he runs away to the mountains with his brother and at the end of the war he seems to be settling his head: he returns to university and at the same time he enrolls in the academy of dramatic art.
Here he finds his mentor in Orazio Costa and, having silenced the family with a stunted law degree, he makes his debut in the theater with Tino Buazzelli in the Maltagliati-Gassman company, mostly being entrusted with dramatic roles by contemporary authors.
He then moved on to the school of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan with Giorgio Strehler and finally, back to Rome, with Eduardo De Filippo.
At the beginning of the 1950s, the turning point, after a long apprenticeship that forged his ductility as an interpreter: with his friends Paolo Ferrari and Gianni Bonagura he imposed himself on the radio in light curtains, between variety and musical comedy (he knows well the notes, can play and sing).
On the radio he finds other masters such as Vittorio Metz, Dino Verde, Marcello Marchesi who perceive his comic talent, especially in the counter-scenes.
At the end of the decade he conquers the Sistina Theater with "Un trapezio per Lisistrata" (partner of Delia Scala) and then triumphs in '62 with "Rugantino", again thanks to Garinei & Giovannini. Although the theater remains a secret lover for life, the cinema has become his real home since the late 1940s with unpretentious regional comedies.
In the mid-1950s he had his first real opportunity with Antonio Pietrangeli and Mauro Bolognini but 1955 will remain fundamental in his life especially for the marriage with the beloved Erminia Ferrari (at the time a model) who will give him three children and will be his companion until the end.
Meanwhile at Cinecittà he refines the acting skills suitable for a cinema that is leaving neorealism behind and brings a lighter tone to the description of ordinary people.
It is a project that fits him perfectly and here he will be able to develop a series of characters immediately familiar to the viewer: the shy provincial, the shrewd peasant, the petty bourgeois in search of fortune, the young and awkward suitor.
In the 1950s, television also discovered it (the mythical "Canzonissima" by Antonello Falqui in which he also dragged his friend and former companion at the Academy, Marcello Mastroianni, for one evening), but Manfredi rounds off his meager earnings with good dubbing skills.
It was precisely his television popularity that forced him into the cast of a sequel famous as "Bold Shot of the Unknowns" (Nanni Loy, 1959).
The following decade finally promoted Nino Manfredi among the "colonels" of cinema thanks to the growing popularity of the Italian comedy.
From "Anni Roarenti" (1962) to "In the year of the Lord" (1969) it is a constant crescendo that goes hand in hand with the affirmation of his favorite directors, from Dino Risi ("Straziami, ma di baci saziami") to Ettore Scola ("Our heroes will succeed").
However, the golden moment of the actor who will also become a director and freely chooses his masks is linked to the 70s: the "monster" Girolimoni for Damiano Damiani;
the emigrant of "Pane e cioccolata" for Franco Brusati, the shack of "Brutti, dirty and bad" again with Scola, the priest of "In the name of the Pope King" with his dearest friend, Luigi Magni.
Behind the camera he immediately made a name for himself with the autobiographical "For Grace Received" in 1971, but he had done the dress rehearsal as a director ten years earlier with the splendid "A Soldier's Adventure", an entirely silent episode in the multi-handed film " Difficult love ".
Also in the 1970s he participated in two of the most beautiful film adventures of his career: with Luigi Comencini he created an unforgettable Geppetto for the television version of "Pinocchio" (1972) and two years later with Ettore Scola he gave life to that choral portrait of a generation that closes an era of Italian comedy thanks to the magical meeting between him, Vittorio Gassman, Stefania Sandrelli and Stefano Satta Flores on the set of "We loved each other so much".
Thanks to the success on TV, he now accepts to attend her more often and also imposes himself as a singer bringing in the hit parade "Tanto pe'cantà", a revisited version of Petrolini's classic, and then treading the stage of Sanremo;
from the 80s onwards, however, his career becomes random: he finds the theater with a couple of texts written and directed by himself, embraces advertising becoming an icon thanks to the talent of Luciano Emmer and the enchanting couple with his "granny "Nerina Montagnani for a coffee brand.
On the screen he appears more and more casually even though his farewell song (in 2003, "the end of a mystery" directed by Miguel Hermoso) earned him the praise of critics and the Bianchi Award at the Venice exhibition.
Immediately after the end of filming a stroke brought him to the death and, after a rapid succession of improvements and relapses, Nino Manfredi died at 83 on June 4, 2004. Four years ago, Rai, thanks to the direction of his son Luca, he dedicated a beautiful film to him for TV with Elio Germano: "In arte Nino" which portrays him in his formative years, between 1939 and 1959. The interpretation of Germano remains the most beautiful homage of our cinema to an artist which has had all the major national awards, but which perhaps deserved an international homage.