Valeria Golino
☼ Born on 22 December 1965, in Naples, Campania, Italy
Biography
Valeria Golino is an Italian actress and film director. She is known to English-language audiences for her role in Rain Man, Big Top Pee-wee and the two Hot Shots! films, especially the olive-in-the-belly-button scene. The second child of an Italian germanist and a Greek painter, Valeria Golino grew up in Naples until her parents parted. After three years in Athens with her mother and another three in Naples with her father, she began to work as a model. She left high school after her first movie and didn't study performing arts at all. In 1985 she got the leading role in Little Flames (1985) by Peter Del Monte and the next year won the Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival for Storia d'amore (1986). After some European co-productions (Dernier été à Tanger (1987), The Gold Rimmed Glasses (1987), Three Sisters (1988)) she began to work in Hollywood (Big Top Pee-wee (1988)). She soon gained prominent roles in Rain Man (1988), Hot Shots! (1991) and Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993). Now she works in the US (Clean Slate (1994), An Occasional Hell (1996)), Europe (The King's Whore (1990), Immortal Beloved (1994)) and in Italy. too, especially with young directors (Come due coccodrilli (1994), Le acrobate (1997), L'albero delle pere (1998)). In 1994 she produced and acted in Slaughter of the Cock (1996) by Greek director Andreas Pantzis. Her voice is more appreciated in Hollywood (where she took speech therapy) than in Italy (where she is sometimes dubbed); in "The Slaughter
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of the Cock" she acts as a deaf and dumb woman. She speaks four languages: Italian, Greek, French and English. Her brother is a musician and their uncle Enzo Golino is a famous journalist.
In the role of actor
I Told You So – TIFF 2023 (01/10/2023)
The interconnected stories of multiple people in Rome during a heatwave are told in I Told You So. It is January, yet Rome is engulfed in an unseasonal heatwave. During this blistering hot day, Gianna (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) reignites her obsession with her ex-best friend Pupa (Valeria Golino), an aging porn star. Gianna is dependent […]
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (20/02/2020)
A young artist develops a romantic connection with the woman she was hired to paint a portrait of in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is a young painter, who travels to an island in eighteenth-century Brittany, where she is hired by La Comtesse (Valeria Golino) to paint a portrait of her […]
Flames (02/05/2017)
Two artists film the events that lead up to the end of their relationship in Flames. Josephine Decker and Zefrey Throwell are New York based multidisciplinary, who are passionately in love with each other. On a whim, they decide to take a spontaneous trip with each other, which marks the beginning of the end for their love […]