Federico Fellini, January 20, 1920 – October 31, 1993) was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for his distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness, he is considered one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of the 20th century.

In a career spanning almost fifty years, Fellini won five Academy Awards including the most Oscars in history for Best Foreign Language Film.

What is less known about Fellini was his ability for cartoon drawing and sketching but he has been doing so all along his life and a large number of his film scripts were addionally completed with sketches he made for future ‘takes’.

Fellini was born on January 20, 1920 to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. In 1924, Fellini started primary school in an institute run by the nuns of San Vincenzo in Rimini, attending the Carlo Tonni public school two years later. An attentive student, he spent his leisure time drawing, staging puppet shows, and reading Il corriere dei piccoli, the popular children’s magazine that reproduced traditional American cartoons by Winsor McCay, George McManus and Frederick Burr Opper. (Opper’s Happy Hooligan would provide the visual inspiration for Gelsomina in Fellini's 1954 film La Strada; McCay’s Little Nemo would directly influence his 1980 film City of Women.) In 1926, he discovered the world of Grand Guignol, the circus with Pierino the Clown, and the movies. Guido Brignone’s Maciste all’Inferno (1926), the first film he saw, would mark him in ways linked to Dante and the cinema throughout his entire career.

In 1937, Fellini opened Febo, a portrait shop in Rimini. with the painter Demos Bonini. His first humorous article appeared in the "Postcards to Our Readers" section of Milan’s Domenica del Corriere. Deciding on a career as a caricaturist and gag writer, Fellini travelled to Florence in 1938, where he published his first cartoon in the weekly 420. Failing his military culture exam, he graduated from high school in July 1938 after doubling the exam.

In September 1939, he enrolled in law school at the University of Rome to please his parents. Biographer Hollis Alpert reports that "there is no record of his ever having attended a class". Installed in a family pensione, he met another lifelong friend, the painter Rinaldo Geleng. Desperately poor, they unsuccessfully joined forces to draw sketches of restaurant and café patrons. Fellini eventually found work as a cub reporter on the dailies Il Piccolo and Il Popolo di Roma but quit after a short stint, bored by the local court news assignments.

Four months after publishing his first article in Marc’Aurelio, the highly influential biweekly humour magazine, he joined the editorial board, achieving success with a regular column titled But Are You Listening? Described as “the determining moment in Fellini’s life”, the magazine gave him steady employment between 1939 and 1942, when he interacted with writers, gagmen, and scriptwriters. These encounters eventually led to opportunities in show business and cinema. Among his collaborators on the magazine’s editorial board were the future director Ettore Scola, Marxist theorist and scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, and Bernardino Zapponi, a future Fellini screenwriter.

Personal and highly idiosyncratic visions of society, Fellini's films are a unique combination of memory, dreams, fantasy and desire. The adjectives "Fellinian" and "Felliniesque" are "synonymous with any kind of extravagant, fanciful, even baroque image in the cinema and in art in general". La Dolce Vita contributed the term paparazzi to the English language, derived from Paparazzo, the photographer friend of journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni).

Contemporary filmmakers such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, Emir Kusturica, and David Lynch, have cited Fellini's influence on their work.

I Vitelloni inspired European directors Juan Antonio Bardem, Marco Ferreri, and Lina Wertmüller and had an influence on Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), George Lucas's American Graffiti (1974), Joel Schumacher's St. Elmo's Fire (1985), and Barry Levinson's Diner (1987), among many others. When the American magazine Cinema asked Stanley Kubrick in 1963 to name his favorite films, the film director listed I Vitelloni as number one in his Top 10 list.

Various film related material and personal papers of Fellini are contained in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives to which scholars and media experts from around the world may have full access. In October 2009, the Jeu de Paume in Paris opened an exhibit devoted to Fellini, running through to January 2010. The exhibition included Fellini ephemera, television interviews, behind-the-scenes photographs, and excerpts from La dolce vita and 8½. It also featured the Book of Dreams based on 30 years of illustrations and notes by Fellini.