The eldest son of a traveling salesman, Federico Fellini was born on January 20, 1920, in the Italian city of Rimini, the capital of the province of the same name on the Adriatic Sea. A town dependent equally on humble fishing and the appeal of its seaside Riviera resorts, Rimini had been an important locale to the Roman Empire and to Catholic Europe in the Middle Ages, but suffered hard times throughout the Renaissance and Enlightenment thanks to pirate attacks, floods, and earthquakes. It was one of many cities revitalized by the spread of modern tourism at the beginning of the twentieth century, and made a deep impact on young Fellini, a presence felt in many of his films.

During World War II, as a young man, he moved to Rome, where he worked as a writer and managed to avoid the draft. The life of his young adulthood would later influence his work as well -- he soon married actress Giulietta Masina, with whom he conceived two children; the first was miscarried, the second died a month after birth. A year younger than Federico, Giulietta had moved to Rome to attend university, where she began acting in theater before getting a job as a voice actress on a radio. Her first movie role came in 1948, and two years later she co-starred in Variety Lights, Federico's first movie. He had worked as a screenwriter, but here collaborated with the more established Alberto Lattuada. Giulietta played Melina Amour, the girlfriend of the manager of the theatrical troupe around which the movie centers. It's a classic light comedy about the romantic misadventures going on behind the scenes of the troupe's performances, but it did poorly, bankrupting the production company.

Fellini's next movie was The White Sheik, a safe venture in some ways as the script had been written by the great Michelangelo Antonioni and was adapted from popular fotoromanzi: fotoromanzi were romance comics which used still photos as their illustrations, instead of hand drawings, a form long popular in Italy. Lattuada had turned the movie down, so Fellini was able to have a crack at it himself. It became his first classic, satirizing those fotoromanzi in a story about a newlywed couple whose honeymoon is disrupted when the bride becomes determined to find "The White Sheik," the star of a fotoromanzi strip she's obsessed with. Giulietta had a small role as a prostitute. The White Sheik was not much better received than Variety Lights, but less was expected of it, and it was Fellini's first time working with composer Nino Rota, who would score all of his movies until dying in 1980.

The rest of his 50s movies were in the style of Italian neorealism, as Lattuada's and Antonioni's were. I Vitteloni was his first success, a comedy-drama set in Rimini about the lives of young men who have not yet found a place in life, and who of course chase young women -- the sort of movie made for every generation. A year later, 1954's La Strada starred Giulietta as a girl sold to a Gypsy carnival strong man played by Anthony Quinn. The vivid, powerful movie won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and brought Fellini considerable international attention. He was already working on Nights of Cabiria at that point, again starring Giulietta; though not as strong as La Strada, it too won the Foreign Language Oscar.

His 1960 movie La Dolce Vita is considered one of the most important movies of the 1960s, but for him it was the lynchpin connecting his 1950s neorealist work with the more experimental later movies which were strongly influenced by his readings of Carl Jung and other psychoanalysts. Set in Rome, La Dolce Vita ("The Sweet Life") follows a week in the life of Marcello Rubini (played by Marcello Mastroianni), a journalist whose beat keeps him covering the trashier, more sensationalist news. The movie was a hit, winning an Oscar for its extravagant costumes, and has been mined by critics ever since who examine its depths of symbolism. He followed it up with his finest film, 8 1/2, a movie named for its production number (Fellini had directed seven previous movies and co-directed one); it casts Mastroianni this time as a film director who has lost interest in the movie he's supposed to be making, and wanders amid dreams and memories. Ultimately, 8 1/2 is a movie about its own creation, and it was his third movie to win the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

The surrealist full-color drama Juliet of the Spirits followed, starring Giulietta in the title role as a housewife cheated on by her husband; much of the movie takes place in Juliet's imaginings as she daydreams to deal with her dull life and the stress of betrayal. The even more dream-like Satyricon, based on the fragmentary Roman novel, came out in 1969; 1973's Amarcord saw him return to something more realistic and down to earth, a comedic coming of age story about his own adolescence in an Italy dominated by Mussolini and the Catholic Church. It too won an Oscar, after a ten year drought for the director. Twenty years later, he was given his last Oscar -- a lifetime achievement award from the Academy, in recognition of the generations of filmmakers he had inspired and influenced. He died later that year, the day after his 50th wedding anniversary.