He’s Happily Stuck in a ‘Beautiful’ Place

Roberto Benigni tumbles into the restaurant at the Chateau Marmont looking supremely distracted, like a man who’s just been jolted out of a sound sleep in front of a live audience and told, “Perform!” Instantly, his signature ear-to-ear grin appears and he greets the interviewer with his effusive bray. If anyone can be said to speak primarily in exclamation points, it’s Benigni.

Even if you’ve already forgotten most of last year’s Academy Award winners, you undoubtedly remember Benigni making his way to the stage of the Dorothy Chandler to accept the best foreign language film award for “Life Is Beautiful” by climbing over the backs of chairs and audience members. It was one of those indelible Oscar moments, like Jack Palance’s one-armed push-ups or Sally Field’s nakedly vulnerable “You like me, you really like me” acceptance speech.

“Oh, mamma mia. It’s unbelievable what happened. I am still in ‘Life Is Beautiful,’ and it’s difficult to get out,” he says, making it all sound almost Pirandellian. “It happened suddenly, out of the blue. One day nobody recognized me here. The next day I’m going to Thrifty to get some bread, some jam. And I’m at the traffic light and everybody is screaming from the cars: ‘Benigni! Roberto!’

“It was like it was organized. The taxi drivers. The people in the stores. Just like that. From one day to another. I was astonished.”

So what do you do for an encore? How about a little Dante--as in the medieval Italian poet, as in “The Divine Comedy”? Yes, that Dante.

It turns out that besides accepting kudos and awards for “Life Is Beautiful,” over the past year, Benigni has been lecturing throughout Italy on Dante Alighieri. His passion for Dante dates back to his boyhood, he says, instilled in him by his parents, and especially his grandmother, whom he describes as a giant peasant woman “with ‘The Divine Comedy’ in one pocket [of her dress] and in the other, a gun.”

Once Dante’s name is uttered, Benigni floods the room with a passionate litany so intense it threatens to spill out into the corridor. “You can joke about almost anything,” he begins. “But when it comes to poetry, you must be serious. I am possessed by Dante. He is very simple. But not easy. I recite Dante screaming because poems are born screaming.

“Inside Dante there is everything. There is Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. There is Groucho Marx. There is Shakespeare. There is Homer. There is God. There is the devil. There is your life. You can see ‘The Divine Comedy’ like a movie with a perfect script. It’s like a cliffhanger, like commedia dell’arte, like a variety show. There are low things. There are high things. When he prays to the Virgin Mary--in 2,000 years of poetry nobody has ever written a poem to a woman with such beauty.”

Pinocchio Inspired Those Oscar Antics

But let’s back up a year. When we last saw Benigni, he was doing his Oscar hurdling routine, a stunt he claims was totally improvised; it was only later that he realized he had unconsciously lifted it from a moment in one of his favorite fables, “The Adventures of Pinocchio,” by Carlo Collodi. Benigni confesses that it came close to calamity--but for the steady hand of director Steven Spielberg, he would have fallen headlong onto the guests in the row in front of him.

But he didn’t, and the audience ate it up. Benigni, who until then was little known outside his native Italy, made Oscar history that night by also winning the Academy Award for best actor. The only other performer to win an acting award for a foreign language film was countrywoman Sophia Loren in 1961 for “Two Women” (who, coincidentally, presented him with the foreign language award).

Since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998, Benigni’s tragicomic fable about the Holocaust, which he also wrote and directed, has consumed his life. Ironically, when he decided to make “Life Is Beautiful,” he thought that the film would alienate audiences used to seeing him in broad comic roles.

Instead, “Life” became a success of mammoth proportions, transforming him into an instantly recognizable international celebrity. The groundswell began at Cannes, when Benigni was presented with the Grand Jury Prize by Martin Scorsese. He rushed up on stage and prostrated himself at the American director’s feet. It brought down the house.

Cannes was only the beginning of what he refers to as his guilt-free “sabbatical” from filmmaking to promote “Life” around the world. The film is one of Italy’s most profitable exports ever, grossing more than $200 million worldwide, about $60 million of that in the U.S. (three times more than any other foreign film ever).

And it goes on: “Life” is the first non-American film to be widely distributed throughout mainland China, he says. Earlier this month, he won a Japanese Oscar for the film. While he shies away from admitting that the movie has made him wealthy, when the interviewer suggests the word “comfortable,” he seizes it.

“Comfortable. That is a wonderful euphemism! More than comfortable!” he exults.

“Life” has made him a rich man in ways he never imagined, he admits. The outpourings of enthusiasm have bordered on the downright dangerous. Recently, he was presented with an honorary doctorate in philosophy at the University of Negev in Israel.

“I receive my degree at sunset in the desert. Spectacular. Shimon Peres, Leah Rabin and all these Nobel Prize winners. And me. Very serious. Much poomp and circumstance.”

A Private Screening With the Pope

After the ceremony, Benigni was forced to leave Negev when fans besieged his hotel “like I was a pop star,” he says, still incredulous. “Such passion and love.” He took refuge for the night at the home of the Italian ambassador in Tel Aviv. When President Clinton visited Italy last year for an international conference, he requested a private dinner with Benigni and invited him to attend the event. At first Benigni thought it was a joke.

He recalls: “And there at one table are Clinton and Tony Blair and the most important men in the world. And at the other table, all their wives. And me,” he says with an Italianate shrug. “It was like the Middle Ages. The kings and the buffoon. The court jester.”

But perhaps the most vivid moment in this wild ride was a private screening of “Life Is Beautiful” at the Vatican, just Pope John Paul II “and me,” sitting side by side, an image so sublimely comic he admits he could never have conjured it up even for his most antic film.

“I couldn’t stand it. I was sweating. I couldn’t wait for the movie to be over,” he says. “I am sitting next to 2,000 years of Catholic history, and in Italy you know he’s, he’s . . .” Suddenly Benigni’s at a loss for words. “The big cheese?” the interviewer posits. “Yes, the big cheese!” Benigni howls.

In an uncharacteristic sotto voce Benigni adds, “I could never have imagined when I was studying shorthand with 58 women that the pope or Mr. Clinton would say, ‘Oh, Benigni, would you like to come to dinner?’ ”

The extent of Benigni’s higher education consists of a brief turn in a Jesuit seminary in Florence, followed by three years in an otherwise all-women’s class studying shorthand and typing. But on his own he became a student and scholar of Dante.

“Every two years I read either ‘The Inferno,’ ‘The Purgatorio’ or ‘The Paradiso,’ ” all part of “The Divine Comedy,” he says.

But Benigni has had to turn down further requests to lecture on Dante, lest he completely lose control of his life. He was in Los Angeles earlier this month to attend the Screen Actors Guild awards, and on Sunday he’ll present the best actress award at the Oscars.

As with every time he visits Los Angeles, the moment he lands here he comes down with some mysterious ailment. He calls it “the syndrome.”

“Every time I come here, something happens to my body. Either it’s the flu or a sore throat. But they can never find anything. And I don’t want to know. I like the mystery.”

Seeking a Role Free of Cliches

After the Oscars he will finally return to work, and he admits he is aching to make another movie. In the past year there have been many offers from Hollywood, a couple of which he’s seriously considered.

“To be frank, I have had some offers. A lot of offers,” he says. “But I didn’t like very much these offers. Unluckily it wasn’t so easy to find something for an Italian actor.”

Many of the projects, he says, were hopelessly cliched--someone in the Mafia, a turn-of-the-century huddled-masses immigrant yearning to be free, a pizza delivery man. “As soon as I would see this, I would stop reading. It is better to wait. I’m sure I will find something. Hollywood is full of very serious persons,” he says with a completely straight face.

For a time he toyed with the idea of a biography of St. Francis of Assisi. Along with Dante and Pinocchio, “the clown of God” (which is how he refers to the great anti-materialist) St. Francis is one of his idols, and he has flirted with the project for many years. After a couple of months, however, Benigni has set aside St. Francis, realizing that the way he handled the story’s serious themes would inevitably be compared to “Life Is Beautiful.”

Instead, his next film will probably be the kind of farcical comedy for which he is best known. He intends to sit down with writing partner Vincenzo Cerami for a few months and start shooting his film, which he says will go back to his old formula--”a big movie from a small idea.”