What happened to the boy from ‘Life is Beautiful’: we saw him in ‘Gladiator’ and he returns to the cinema 20 years later

Maybe your name Giorgio CantariniI don’t tell you anything, but it has made you cry on two occasions. Both resulted in Oscar awards and one of them is very likely to have been revived recently: we are talking about Gladiatorin which Cantarini plays the son of Máximo Decimus Meridio. His screen time is brief, but he doesn’t need much more. By the time he reappears almost at the end of the film, the audience already receives him with a lump in our throats.

Giorgio Cantarini is a good son in fiction, although to the detriment of depriving his parents of an admirable life expectancy. Both in life is beautiful as in Gladiatorthe actors who played his parents, Roberto Benigni and Russell Crowe, won a statuette.

Likewise, both films achieved the main Oscar for which they aspired: best foreign film in the case of life is beautiful (which was also nominated, although without options, in the major category), simply best film Gladiator. However, Cantarini disappeared after this brilliant start. What has become of him?

What happened to Giorgio Cantarini?

Cantarini was born in April 1992, which makes the fragile and laughing child of life is beautiful in a thirty-something who, like so many other thirty-somethings, defines himself on his Instagram as a “free thinker and citizen of the world.” After chaining life is beautiful and GladiatorCantarini immersed himself in studies, which he only abandoned to star in the occasional TV movie and an unfindable Italian film (Il giorno la notte poi l’alba).

His university graduation followed his participation in the transalpine version of dancing with the stars (although, in this case, only minors participated in Ballando con le stelline). Most of what is known about his life was told by Cantarini himself in the award-winning documentary Protagonisti per semperdedicated to the most famous child actors of Italian cinema.

Cantarini joins a large family made up of Salvatore Calcio, the protagonist of Cinema Paradisoor Rinaldo Smordoni, the shocking teenager of The Shoe Shineby Vittorio De Sica, the film that premiered the international Oscar.

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For years, it seemed that Giorgio Cantarini had gotten lost in the trap in which child prodigies are trapped. Only recently has he freed himself from it: in recent years, and after two decades without leaving Italy, he has appeared in the biopic Lamborghini: The man behind the legend in which, among others, Gabriel Byrne and Mira Sorvino act. Currently, a series in which he plays the main role is in post-production and a few months ago he shared the bill with Pierfrancesco Favino in The good Italian.