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The son of a traveling salesman who sold foodstuffs and a mother who believed that, in marrying beneath her, she betrayed her links to Roman nobility, Fellini grew up believing he belonged in Rome. In the late 1930s he moved there with his mother and brother. Only Federico stayed on, however, surviving by selling cartoons, gags, and stories to the humour magazine Marc’Aurelio. During World War II Fellini wrote scripts for the radio serial Cico e Pallina, starring Giulietta Masina, who became his wife in 1943 and who appeared in several of his films during an often troubled 50-year marriage.

In 1944 Fellini met director Roberto Rossellini and became one of a team of writers for Roma, città aperta (1945; Open City or Rome, Open City), a pioneer film of Neorealism. Fellini’s contribution to the screenplay earned him his first Oscar nomination.

Fellini quickly became one of Italy’s most successful screenwriters. He collaborated on screenplays for such directors as Pietro Germi (Il cammino della speranza [1950; The Path of Hope]), Alberto Lattuada (Senza pietà [1948; Without Pity]), and Luigi Comencini (Persiane chiuse [1951; Behind Closed Shutters]); he was uncredited on the latter film. In addition, Fellini contributed to Rossellini’s Paisà (1946; Paisan) and Il miracolo (1948; “The Miracle”, an episode of the film L’amore), in which he also acted, playing a tramp who impregnates a simple-minded peasant when she takes him for the reincarnation of St. Joseph.

Fellini’s quest for a more personal style, which often verged on the fantastic, alienated Neorealist purists. His directorial debut, Luci del varietà (1950; Variety Lights), made in collaboration with Lattuada, is set in a traveling variety show. An enthusiast of the seedy side of show business, in particular vaudeville and the circus, Fellini returned to this milieu repeatedly, beginning with his first independent feature, Lo sceicco bianco (1952; The White Sheik), a satire on the fumetti (photographic comic strips) and their fanatical fans. However, his first critical and commercial success, I vitelloni (1953; Spivs or The Young and the Passionate), exhibited little fantasy. Based on his own adolescence in Rimini, it faithfully reflects the boredom of provincial life, which drove him to Rome.

With La strada (1954; “The Road”), Fellini returned to the world of showmen. It starred Anthony Quinn as Zampanò, a brutish but phoney itinerant "strong man," and Masina as the waif who loves him. The film was shot on desolate locations between Viterbo and Abruzzi, mean villages and flinty roads that were intended to reflect the moral aridity of Quinn’s character, throwing into relief the sweet, forgiving nature of Masina’s Gelsomina. A commercial success, La strada won an Academy Award for best foreign film, and Nino Rota’s plaintive theme song became a hit. Producers offered to feature Masina as Gelsomina in a sequel, but Fellini instead gave her a small role only in the cynical Il bidone (1955; “The Swindle”), which featured Broderick Crawford as the leader of a gang of con men who impersonate priests in order to rob the peasantry. Masina asserted her star quality in Le notti di Cabiria (1957; Nights of Cabiria), developing the minor character she played in Lo sceicco bianco, a good-natured Roman prostitute who is optimistic even when humiliated and is swindled by the man she expects to marry. One of Fellini’s most likeable films, it won an Oscar for best foreign film and inspired the 1966 Broadway musical comedy Sweet Charity and the 1969 movie of the same name.

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La dolce vita (1960; “The Sweet Life”) was the first of many collaborations with Marcello Mastroianni, an actor who came to represent Fellini’s alter ego. Inspired by newspaper headlines and some topical scandals, the film comprehensively indicts a Rome dominated by foreign movie stars, corrupt journalists, and decadent aristocrats. Condemned by the Roman Catholic Church but hailed by the public, La dolce vita contributed the word paparazzo (unscrupulous yellow-press photographer) to the English language and the adjective Felliniesque to the lexicon of film critics. He then made his first foray in colour, directing the segment Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio (“The Temptation of Dr. Antonio”) for the omnibus feature Boccaccio ’70 (1962).

Otto e mezzo (1963; 8 1/2) is among Fellini’s most widely praised films and earned the director his third Oscar for best foreign film. Entitled 8 1/2 for the number of films Fellini had made by that time (seven features and two shorts), it shows a famous director (based on Fellini and portrayed by Mastroianni) in creative paralysis. Harried by argumentative screenwriters, importunate actresses, a terse unloving wife, and his brainless giggling girlfriend, he takes refuge in fantasies of childhood and the dream of a perfect, and therefore unattainable, woman, embodied in Claudia Cardinale.

In 1965 Fellini’s health failed as he prepared what would have been his most personal work, The Journey of G. Mastorna, a dreamlike vision of the afterlife, starring Mastroianni. Forced to abandon the project, he fortuitously found an alternative outlet for his fantasies in colour. Technology placed in Fellini’s hands the tools to realize the visions that until then existed only in his dreams: “I close my eyes,” he wrote of his nocturnal imaginings, “and the festival starts.” His notebooks recording those dreams, lavishly illustrated, became his raw material. He embraced fantasy even more enthusiastically in Giulietta degli spiriti (1965: Juliet of the Spirits), with Masina as a simple bourgeois haunted by the supernatural.