Paolo Villaggio (Italian:[ˈpaːolovilˈladdʒo]; 30 December 1932 — 3 July 2017) was an Italian actor, voice actor, writer, director and comedian. He is noted for the characters he created with paradoxical and grotesque characteristics: Professor Kranz, the ultra-timid Giandomenico Fracchia, and the obsequious and meek accountant Ugo Fantozzi, perhaps the favourite character in Italian comedy. He wrote several books, usually of satirical character. He also acted in dramatic roles, and appeared in several movies.
This article needs additional citations for verification. (April 2024)
You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Italian. (April 2024) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
View a machine-translated version of the Italian article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 3,072 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Italian Wikipedia article at [[:it:Paolo Villaggio]]; see its history for attribution.
You should also add the template {{Translated|it|Paolo Villaggio}} to the talk page.
Paolo Villaggio was born in Genova, to Ettore Villaggio (1905–1992), a surveyor originally from Palermo, and Maria, originally from Venice, a German-language teacher. Paolo had a twin brother, Piero, who taught at the University of Pisa.[citation needed]
From there, Villaggio was hired for the TV programme Quelli della domenica (The Sunday guys), in which Fantozzi made his first appearance, introduced his characters, the aggressive "Professor Kranz" and the hypocritical "Giandomenico Fracchia".[1]
After his television experience, Villaggio started writing, for the magazines L'Espresso and L'Europeo, short stories featuring accountant Ugo Fantozzi, a man with a weak character, dogged by misfortune and by the "mega-director" of the "mega-company" where he works. In 1971, the publishing house Rizzoli released the book Fantozzi, a collection of these stories, which sold over a million copies,[1] followed soon by the sequel Il secondo tragico libro di Fantozzi.
The first book received the Gogol Prize in Moscow and led to his 1975 appearance in the film Fantozzi, directed by Luciano Salce. The film's success led to a sequel, Il secondo tragico Fantozzi, with the same director in the following year, in which Fantozzi delivered his most famous line: "Per me... La corazzata Kotiomkin[sic] ... è una cagata pazzesca!!!", or roughly "As I see it... Battleship Kotiomkin[sic]... is an unbelievable load of crap!!!".[1]
Six sequel books were then released, with the last one published in 2012. Seven other films followed, which ended in 1999, but were often much less based on the short stories and the books.
Villaggio continued writing while acting in films. He moved to the Mondadori publishing house in 1994. He published Fantozzi saluta e se ne va (1994–1995; "Fantozzi Says Goodbye and Leaves"), Vita morte e miracoli di un pezzo di merda ("Life, Death and Miracles of a Piece of Shit", 2002), 7 grammi in 70 anni ("7 Grammes in 70 Years", 2003) and his latest, Sono incazzato come una belva ("I'm Fucking Mad as a Beast") in 2004.
He also acted in stage plays, playing Arpagone in L'Avare of Molière in 1996. In 1996 he conducted the satirical news bulletin Striscia la notizia (broadcast on Canale 5), together with Massimo Boldi. More recently, he participated in the television fiction Carabinieri, in which he played the role of a tramp who often helped the police to solve crimes. Villaggio was also a lyricist. With fellow Genoan Fabrizio De André, he wrote two songs, "Carlo Martello torna dalla battaglia di Poitiers" ("Charles Martel returning from the Battle of Poitiers") and "Il fannullone" ("The Loafer").
Death
Villaggio died on 3 July 2017 from complications of diabetes in Rome at the age of 84.[2]
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Paolo_Villaggio, and is written by contributors.
Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.