Valeria Golino
Actress, director, producer & screenwriter
Actress and director, Valeria Golino is also a producer and a screenwriter. She received more than 65 international prizes.
Born in Naples to an Italian father and a Greek mother, she drew attention from age 14 when she became a model. Her charm and presence easily opened doors into the acting profession. She made her film debut in 1983, and only three years later earned the Best Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival for her role in Francesco Maselli’s A Tale of Love.
In 1988, she nabbed one of the leading roles in Barry Levinson’s Rain Man alongside Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. In 1989, she headlined Jerzy Skolimovski’s Torrents of Spring alongside Timothy Hutton and Natassja Kinski. In the 1990s, she played multiple parts in American productions, notably the two madcap installments of Jim Abrahams’ Hot Shots!, Sean Penn’s 1991 The Indian Runner, and John Carpenter’s 1996 Escape from L.A.
In 2002, she was widely hailed for her role in Emanuele Crialese’s Respiro. She notably won the Best Actress Silver Ribbon for her performance in that film as a free-spirited woman. She distinguished herself with several French-speaking roles in the 2000s, most notably Olivier Marchal’s 36 Quai des Orfèvres (2004) and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s Actresses (2007). In 2006, she won the David di Donatello for Best Actress for her role in Antonio Capuano’s Mario’s War.
In 2013, Valeria Golino directed her first film, Honey, on the delicate subject of euthanasia. The film was selected at the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. That same year, she won again the David di Donatello for her role in Human Capital directed by Paolo Virzì. In 2015, she was awarded for the second time with the Volpi Cup at the Mostra for her performance in Giuseppe M. Gaudino’s Anna. She then hopscotched between French and Italian films, and directed a second feature film, Euphoria, in 2018. She was directed again by Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi in The Summer House (2018), then Céline Sciamma in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Costa-Gavras in Adults in the Room (2019), Gabriele Salvatores in All my Crazy Love (2019), and Stefano Mordini in You Came Back (2020).
Valeria Golino most recently appeared in Jasmine Trinca’s Marcel! (2022) and Ginevra Elkann’s I Told You So, presented at the last Toronto Film Festival. She also starred in the second season of the series The Morning Show (2021), then in the series adaptation for Netflix of a novel by Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults (2023). The actress will next be seen in Pablo Larrain’s Maria, alongside Angelina Jolie, which follows the life story of world-famous opera singer Maria Callas. She also wrote and directed the new miniseries The Art of Joy, an adaptation of Goliarda Sapienza’s novel about the violent life of her rebellious heroine Modesta.
