Monicelli is an Italian screenwriter and director, one of the most important authors and “fathers” of commedie all'italiane. He studied history and philosophy in Rome and Pisa. He began his film career as an assistant director and co-screenwriter. He made his debut with the short feature film (16 mm) The Boys of Via Paal (I ragazzi dela via Paal, 1935, awarded at the Venice Film Festival) co-directed with Alberto Mondadori. He directed his next film, the medium length feature Pioggia d'estate (1937), on his own. From 1936 to 1942, he wrote many screenplays and assisted many directors (most often Giacomo Gentilomo). His official directing debut was his third film Totò cerca casa (1949), co-directed by Stefano Vanzina-Steno. Over the next four years they continued their collaboration and made eight commercial films, most of them starring the comedian Totò (Guardie e ladri (1951), Totò e i re di Roma (1951) and Totò e le donne (1952). Starting in 1953, he began directing on his own and also continued to write screenplays. His most important films from that period include I ragazzi dela via Paal (Proibito, 1954), Donatella (1956), A Tailor's Maid (Padri e figli, 1957), Big Deal on Madonna Street (I soliti ignoti, 1958), which revealed Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni’s talent for comedy. The Great War (La grande guerra, 1959) is considered his best film, and it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival (together with Il generale della Rovere by Roberto Rossellini) and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. He received the same nomination for his film The Organizer (I compagni, 1963) and The Girl with a Pistol (La ragazza con la pistola, 1968). He also directed Casanova '70 (1965), For Love and Gold (L'armata Brancaleone, 1966) and its sequel Brancaleone at the Crusades (Brancaleone alle crociate, 1970). In the1970s he made We Want the Colonels (Vogliamo i colonnelli, 1973), My Friends (Amici miei, 1975), Caro Michele (1976) and An Average Little Man (Un borghese piccolo piccolo, 1977). He remained active in the1980s and made the comedy Il marchese del Grillo (1981), a sequel to his earlier film My Friends entitled simply All My Friends Part 2 (Amici miei atto II, 1982), Speriamo che sia femmina (1985) starring Liv Ullmann and Catherine Deneuve and the drama I picari (1988.). His last films are Parenti serpenti (1992), Cari fottutissimi amici (1994), Looking for Paradise (Facciamo paradiso, 1995) and The Roses of the Desert (Le rose del deserto, 2006), which he directed at the age of 91. He directed more than forty films on his own and won many awards for them (Venice, Berlin, Mar del Plata), and in 1991, he received the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement award in Venice. During his career, he worked with some of the best Italian actors and actresses (Totò, Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi, Anna Magnani, Monica Vitti, Claudia Cardinale, Sophia Loren) and many European and American stars. Besides films, he also directed for TV and radio and even acted sometimes. He died in 2010 after jumping off the 5th floor of a hospital in Rome where he was admitted due to severe cancer for which he had been treated in the last year of his life.